Be the first to comment!Heritage Malta to hold Graffiti Exhibition at the Malta Maritime Museum
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Heritage Malta will soon be launching an innovative and interesting exhibition featuring maritime graffiti found around the Maltese islands.
Graffiti in their silence deliver a message. They emanate messages that transcend society, ideology and generations. From ancient Pompeian brothels to the ruins of the Berlin wall in post modern Europe, graffiti served a purpose of a permanent meaning.
In Malta, this phenomenon appears in the prehistoric temples of Tarxien, and their incidence is persistent throughout the ages to the present day. The importance of graffiti has only been recently acknowledged and they remain by and large a new facet of maritime ethnography. The more historians delve into this subject, the more we learn that this is a nationwide phenomena lost somewhere in time.
The Malta Maritime Museum will be holding an exhibition on maritime graffiti in Malta between November 2013 and March 2014. Scattered around Malta, graffiti are found on megalithic stones, medieval prisons, and on modern buildings such as wayside chapels, parish churches, public buildings and private homes.
To document all the graffiti in Malta is impossible. The exhibition is based on the pioneering research work by the Museums Department former employee Joseph Muscat and his recent donation of various casts of ship graffiti to the museum.
A number of salvaged original graffiti will also be displayed, including a large ship graffito and legend dating to 1766 salvaged from a demolished residence in Zurrieq.
The exhibition will be inaugurated on the 28th of November and will be open to the public as from Friday 29th.
This is the latest of initiatives that Heritage Malta has accustomed the Maltese and foreign visitors to in its commitment to make our cultural heritage accessible to all.
For more information about this and other similar initiatives one can visit the official Heritage Malta website www.heritagemalta.org or follow the agency’s pages on Facebook.
