Tabling Emotion
Tabling Emotion is a pop-up activist art installation, curated by Andrew Borg Wirth and assembled together with the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation, highlighting seven unresolved justice cases in Malta. Through a curated table display of personal artefacts, the project evokes empathy and remembrance. Accompanying artworks by socially engaged artists amplify its call to witness, reflect, and advocate for justice and political accountability.
When justice is delayed, what remains? Grief is suspended — not resolved, not consoled — but stretched across years and generations. This curatorial project resists the idea that time heals all wounds. Some wounds deepen in the absence of justice.
The dual meaning of “tabling” suggests both the physical act of presenting and the metaphorical act of addressing difficult truths, unresolved and unspoken. The sound we have come to associate with the word “emotion” suggests an intimate caress. It is a quiet, softecho and a forceful undercurrent that persists through time. It is not a loud, transient cry, but a lingering murmur that inches at the cusp of something else. It implies an expectation and embeds a power in whoever utters it, even if under their breath.
In each of these seven homicide cases shown , justice has been tabled but pushed aside by bureaucracy, lack of political will or prejudice. These delays are not passive. They are acts
of neglect, and they come at a cost: families waiting in limbo, evidence decaying, communities carrying the weight of silence. Subverting the parliamentary act of tabling a motion, this installation — and the artworks shown alongside it — presents a reality that is both universally political and intimately personal. It centers the voices of victims and their families and the artists who echo their grief, frustration and demand of justice. If at the heart of justice, there lie people, then at the heart of injustice, there lies neglect; an absence of care, a disregard for human dignity, an erasure of individual stories. Injustice thrives in spaces where empathy is absent, where power ignores those who suffer, and systems meant to protect instead prevent.
At its core, delayed justice is an abandonment. Who is held accountable when systems fail? What
does justice mean when it comes too late-or if not at all? The installation presents seven cases of delayed justice. The exhibition shows seven artists and their frustration, hopes and musings as they -
and we— wait.
Production: The Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation x R Gallery
Curator: Andrew Borg Wirth
Creative Direction | R Gallery: Kathrine Maj
Research and Project Management | The Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation: Tina Urso and Michaela Pia Camilleri
Design: Tracey Sammut
Co-funded by the European union
24th July to 29th August 2025, R Gallery, 26 Tigne Street, Sliema.
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