Matthew Attard

Biography

Matthew Attard (b. 1987, Malta) is a Maltese artist working through drawing and multimedia to investigate the power of images as social constructs. He represented Malta at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 with his solo exhibition I Will Follow the Ship, co-curated by Elyse Tonna and Sara Dolfi Agostini, presented at the Arsenale. The project took as its starting point historical graffiti of ships incised into the stone facades of Maltese wayside chapels between the 15th and 18th centuries, unifying metaphors of hope and survival left by generations of anonymous hands. Using a commercially available eye-tracking device, adapted and at times deliberately misused, Attard traced these historical lines with his gaze, building custom libraries of eye-tracking and sea-imagery data that fed generative algorithms he developed himself, rather than relying on pretrained AI models. Audiences were also invited to draw their own digital ships on mobile devices, contributing to an expanding database of collective imagination that linked historical mark-making to contemporary participatory technology. Influenced by writers including Jonathan Crary and Kate Crawford, Attard treats eye-tracking and AI as historically situated, non-neutral technologies, using them as metaphors for attention, surveillance, and perception rather than tools of spectacle. His broader practice includes earlier eye-tracking works made while staring at the ceiling during COVID-19 isolation, and he continues to explore the boundary between historical drawing practices and contemporary digital and tracking technologies, with recent solo exhibitions including Variations at R Gallery in Malta.