Framing Reality : In Focus, Out of Truth
This winter, City of Art presents BLOW-UP, a major exhibition at Spazju Kreattiv, Valletta, exploring how image-making, through cinema, fashion, photography and performance, has evolved from documenting life to defining it.
When the camera turns on the world, who decides what is real?
Taking its title from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 masterpiece Blow-Up, the exhibition traces a six-decade transformation, from the moment when film mirrored the world to our contemporary condition, where reality bends to the image. In Antonioni’s film, a fashion photographer enlarges a single frame in search of truth, only to find reality dissolving. That question, what do we really see when we look?, remains at the heart of this new curatorial project.
Across four rooms, BLOW-UP maps the entwined evolution of art, fashion and cinema from the 1960s to today. The exhibition opens amid the visual codes of the decade that changed everything: Helmut Newton’s daring portraits, Christian Dior’s silhouettes and Andy Warhol’s serial pop images. David Hockney’s colour-saturated canvases converse with Joana Biarnés’ documentary photography, while the sounds of Karlheinz Stockhausen reverberate through the space, evoking a world newly conscious of itself as image.
Each work becomes a fragment in a broader story, the moment when culture realised that to see was also to perform. If the sixties invented the modern image, BLOW-UP suggests, they also invented the modern attitude toward it: self-aware, performative and endlessly reproducible.
Fast forward six decades, and Antonioni’s anxieties feel eerily prophetic. Today, every frame, post and self-portrait is a negotiation between authenticity and artifice. The exhibition’s contemporary sections explore this collapse of certainty, confronting surveillance, self-curation and digital distortion. Visitors move through installations that make them both subject and observer, caught in the spectacle they came to watch.
Beyond the gallery, BLOW-UP unfolds into a wider programme of events that extend its central ideas into dialogue and performance. Opening night features In Conversation with Francesca Grima, where Luke Azzopardi speaks with Francesca Grima, daughter of the visionary jeweller Andrew Grima (1921–2007). Known as the father of modern jewellery, Andrew Grima revolutionised postwar design with his sculptural approach and bold use of unconventional materials.
This marks Francesca’s first visit to Malta, an occasion of personal resonance as she reflects on her father’s legacy, Maltese roots and the ongoing relevance of his work in contemporary design.
Midway through the exhibition, BLOW-UP hosts an academic seminar and catalogue launch, moderated by Maria Theuma, bringing together artists and scholars to unpack the project’s key themes: visibility, truth and the politics of perception. The accompanying publication is more than a record; it is a critical extension of the exhibition, pairing richly illustrated spreads with essays that move between eras and mediums. Contributors reflect on art, film, performance and fashion as interlinked languages of power and representation. In its pages, the cultural ferment of the 1960s meets today’s fragmented media reality, reminding us that how we see remains inseparable from how we are seen.
The programme culminates on 13 December 2025 with Azzopardi Studio’s 22nd collection, Venus in Furs, a multidisciplinary presentation staged within the conceptual framework of BLOW-UP. Known for fusing couture with performance and research, Luke Azzopardi revisits the sixties not through nostalgia, but as a way to reimagine its codes for the future. The garments evoke both decadence and discipline, drawing from the radical energy of the era’s art and cinema. Fashion here becomes a form of inquiry, asking what glamour and rebellion mean in an age that sees everything.
Ultimately, BLOW-UP is not just an exhibition; it is a meditation on the gaze itself. To walk through it is to experience the tension between seeing and being seen, between the desire for truth and the seduction of illusion. In a culture saturated with images, it reminds us that every act of looking carries power. Perhaps what remains of the real, as Antonioni implied, is precisely what refuses to be captured.
BLOW-UP is presented under the patronage of City of Art’s main patrons Jordi Goetstouwers and Valeria Limentani, with the support of Spazju Kreattiv, Arts Council Malta (Arts Support Scheme), the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Tourism, Festivals Malta, Deloitte, Heritage Malta, MAPFRE and the University of Malta.
For tickets, registration, and information, visit cityofart.eu
