Tropes and transformations

identifying objects brings together live performance, installation, sculpture, objects, and set design to explore the relationship between performance, the body, identity, and material reality.

Across the exhibition, objects – gym equipment, grills, energy drink cans, swing, ropes and clothing – become active participants in performances of masculinity, parenthood, and gender. The works examine how identities are tied to objects and reproduced through them, while also imagining possibilities for transformation and liberation. Moving between the familiar and the estranged, the artists use humour, discomfort, desire, anxiety, and play to expose expectations embedded in everyday gestures and interactions.

Three performances activate the space in a shared spatiality. Artist Teo Paaer has created the installations and sculptural elements for Romeo Roxman Gatt’s and Pauliina Sjöberg’s performances in close collaboration with the artists. Paaer often invites collaborators into his world shaped by fictional and real junkyards, back alleys and their eccentric characters. Working with rough, industrial materials brings him into contact with creative people outside the art world, including construction workers, mechanics, car enthusiasts, and salvage yard owners.

Romeo Roxman Gatt’s GRILLS GRILLS GRILLS (2026) approaches masculinity as mechanically reproduced through ritual and repetition. Together with Paaer, he transforms the gallery into a dystopian Maltese backyard BBQ: a fragmented stage for masculine rituals. At its centre, a car hood becomes a functioning grill, simultaneously sculpture, altar, masculine emblem, and deteriorating body.

In the next gallery space, a sprawling hybrid character inhabits an installation combining large-scale objects and machine-like structures. The installation carries traces of an alternative kink playspace, children’s playground, and gym. Both caregiver and cared-for, the character is unruly, reckless, and hungry for attention.  Pauliina Sjöberg’s autofictional work Risky Play (2026) draws from the embodied realities of parenthood and caregiving. Created by Paaer and Sjöberg, the installation offers an environment for sensory exploration and testing bodily boundaries. Its scale draws on Sjöberg’s childhood memories of monumental machinery in industrial harbours.

A gym bench in the front of the space recalls Calvin Z Laing’s three-part performance Calvin & Bulk Times (2026), which presents three versions of Calvin to explore transformation, identity, and performance. The work navigates the awkwardness of masculinity and the constraints of binary identities, embracing vulnerability and play as ways of questioning how we present ourselves.

Alongside the performances, visual artist Alexa Illi presents two works. Working with appropriated imagery, pop cultural references, and autobiographical storytelling, she constructs scenes of longing, dissociation, loss, and love through a transfeminine gaze. In Model No. 03 (2026), a collectible Barbie doll from the 2009 Barbie Basics collection is viewed from above, detached from the carefully constructed image intended for display. In Through the weeks between (2023), fragmented images and cultural references evoke the persistence of memory and desire, recalling traces that remain after an image has been replaced. Both works play with visual and physical barriers, evoking detachment and alienation, but also the inherent distance of romance and unreachable desire.

The language of objects remains as elusive as any other register, resisting attempts to fix or lock in preconceived identities. What remains is a continual play of recognition and identification, yet the rules are constantly changing.