Raphael Vella. Kratija

From 19 June to 12 July 2025, the Vilnius Graphic Art Centre gallery ‘Kairė-dešinė’ will host an exhibition by Raphael Vella (Malta) titled ‘Kratija’ (curated by Žygimantas Augustinas). The opening will take place on 19 June 2025 (Thursday), 6 pm.

We live in a time when the existence of democracy as we know it is under threat. Although the artist of the exhibition Raphael Vella argues that we have never been entirely democratic, as our political agenda has always been concerned exclusively with human interests, a question arises whether we would now be living in a more stable world had we been more democratic and more considerate of the needs of animals and plants.

Raphael Vella is looking for an answer in his drawing series The Natural Contract (2024), The Sitting is Open (2024), Sleep Cycle (2023), and HOMeS (2016). In these drawings, nature takes over the spaces of European countries’ parliaments, while modernist architecture gloats next to the ruins of war, untouched by calamity. The video works The Silent Darkness of Limitless Hope (2024) and News from Nowhere (2022) depict modernist utopias in which ambitious human attempts to make the world more comfortable and pleasing take on dystopian features. Raphael refers to milieus where a non-human order prevails as Zoocratic Zones. Here, anthropocentric foundations of governance are questioned, while exploring the role of non-human beings as active participants in political and social life, interrogating the present and offering speculative imaginaries, as well as rethinking political relations across a spectrum of fields.

Kratija is a made-up word that sounds like the name of a place or a system of governance. It is based on the Greek word Krátos (referring to force or violence), used as an ending in the names of systems of government: technocracy, democracy, bureaucracy… Until recently, it was believed that force and violence are relics of the past, but the world we currently live in unfolds precisely as a site of collision of different forces. The forces and laws of nature, as well as the unruly human nature itself, demand attention with increasing insistence.

Žygimantas Augustinas

Raphael Vella is an artist, educator and curator based in Malta. He has a PhD in Fine Arts (University of the Arts London) and has exhibited his works in many international exhibitions and venues, including the Venice Biennale, Domaine Pommery and Modern Art Oxford. He was artist-in-residence at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand for a year in 2000 and was a founding member of the artists’ group StART in the early 2000s. Raphael Vella was Fulbright scholar at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in the US in 2001 and has curated many group and solo exhibitions in Malta and internationally over the last 20 years. He is also a professor at the University of Malta and regularly collaborates with art departments in universities and cultural entities in other countries. Vella co-curated the Malta pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017.

Illustration: Raphael Vella. The Sitting is Open 4. 2024. Mixed media on paper, 57,1 × 42. Photo by Lisa Attard