Me in place and the place in me, now showing at the Malta Art Biennale 2026
Self portrait with the rocks, 2025.
I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.
*
Where can it be found again,
An elsewhere world, beyond
Maps and atlases
from A herbal by Seamus Heaney
Me in Place and the Place in Me brings together four interconnected projects that explore Nina Gerada’s relationship with her homeland, Malta. After moving to London at 19 and returning 22 years later, she explores exile and loss. At its core, it’s about the profound, reciprocal relationship between a person and their native landscape.
Self portrait with the rocks, 2025.
Gerada works with durational processes, exploring memory and time, centering the body as both subject and tool. She walks, places her body in the landscape, draws and sculpts, making associations between a multitude of references: figurative, prehistoric, geological, makeshift. Made with care, using humble materials, her works are infused with nostalgia; depicting an intimate interconnectedness between body, self and landscape.
Portrait of the rocks, 2025.
A map of Malta, drawn entirely from memory, captures a moment in time before the recent construction boom: Malta is drawn on the threshold of rapid transformation, preserving both personal and collective memories of a distant homeland.
Memory map of Malta, 2009.
Gerada has been walking the entire coastline of the Maltese islands, shown here in a collection of photographs and self-portraits. Placing her body within, around, and among the rock formations of Malta. Through simple, performative gestures — hugging the rocks, sitting with them — she expresses childlike delight and a desire not merely to be in the landscape, but to be part of it and held by it.
Self portrait with the rocks, 2025.
Themes of support and containment appear throughout.
Reflecting on motherhood, Gerada writes: “I envisioned myself as a sea rock, shaped by waves, transforming, yet strong, unmoving. I was being weathered — yet still I was a rock.”
Self portrait with the rocks, 2025.
This vision speaks to a longing to move beyond the limits of the human body and a single lifetime, and to connect instead with geological time, aligning herself with something ancient and enduring. This led to a series of anthropomorphic sculptures that merge human and rock-like forms. Precariously balanced on makeshift stools - used by the local fishing community to hold boats steady on land – representing support: ancestors, community, parents.