RE:FRAGMENTS – PRESON: Presence Beyond the Walls continues and transforms Floating Fragments, the Correctional Services Agency’s contribution to the Malta Biennale 2026. Developed through a sustained artistic and educational process with people in prison, the exhibition brings these works into a new setting: the architectural and cultural context of MUŻA – The National Community Art Museum.

At the Biennale, the works were suspended in transparent cubes filled with water, held within a black-box installation built around ideas of containment and distance. At MUŻA, that vocabulary is removed. The water is gone, the suspension is gone, and the works become grounded within the museum, entering new relationships with each other, with the space, and with the visitor. The prefix RE: marks this shift: a process of revisiting, rereading and re-encountering fragments that remain the same, seen under different conditions.

At the centre of the exhibition is PRESON, a term coined by curator Prof. Rolf Laven that sits between prison and person. It isn’t a new label for the people who made this work — it’s a way of interrupting the tendency for institutional categories to stand in for the whole person. The exhibition doesn’t try to resolve or make whole the fragments on display. Instead, it asks how they can remain distinct, carrying their own histories and complexities, while entering into new relationships with one another and with everyone who encounters them.