● ● ● Selected Work

01 GRILLS GRILLS GRILLS

by Romeo Roxman Gatt
installation / performance / video
2026

Forum Box
Helsinki, Finland

24–25 July 2026

Installation: Romeo Roxman Gatt & Teo Paaer
Sound: Romeo Roxman Gatt, co-produced with Adrian Camilleri
Production: Lou Galleria
Documentation: Inari Sandell

Supported by: Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland

identifying objects
Concept: Teo Paaer & Remi Vesala
Curated by: Remi Vesala

In identifying objects, I presented the installation and performance GRILLS GRILLS GRILLS (2026), approaching masculinity as a lived reality that is continually rehearsed and reshaped. Through everyday gestures, rituals and social codes, the work traces how masculinity is learned, embodied and performed.

Familiar objects are reconfigured into a dystopian Maltese backyard BBQ: a fragmented stage set where domesticity, machinery, ritual and the body begin to collapse into one another.

Using AI-generated imagery and animation, the video places a version of myself within this environment, alongside two children who appear as miniature replicas of me. This strange image of fatherhood and repetition considers inheritance: how masculinity, behaviour and identity are learned, performed and passed on.

During the live performance, the world on screen extends into the gallery. I appear physically amongst the same chairs, objects and visual codes as my digital counterpart, allowing the mediated and physical body, video, installation and performance to bleed into one another.

Installation View

Performance shot

Image 3

Image 4

Performance shot

Image 6

Image 7

Image 8

Nothing Melts Alone (01’13”) <excerpt>

02 ELEVANI

by Romeo Roxman Gatt
360° video / performance / installation
2026

Malta Pavilion
BEJN / IN-BETWEEN
16th Gwangju Biennale
Gwangju, South Korea

Concept & Direction: Romeo Roxman Gatt
Direction: Romeo Roxman Gatt & PONKS
Words, Sound & Choreography: Romeo Roxman Gatt
3D / AI Visuals: Costas Kazantzis
Vocals & Mixing: Adrian Camilleri
Sculptural Elements: Julien Vinet
Hair: Aury at Elena Salon
Wearable Sculpture: Romeo Roxman Gatt
Translation: Joe Gatt
Produced by: BEJN Kollettiva

Commissioned by: Arts Council Malta
Supported by: Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Tourism of Malta — Cultural Diplomacy Fund

Filmed on location: XVIIIth-century chapel, Kalkara, Malta

ELEVANI takes place within the ruins of the Saviour Gate Chapel in Kalkara. Damaged by bombing during WWII, the abandoned chapel is now set within a landscape of new buildings and overdevelopment, as Kalkara undergoes rapid gentrification and polishing.

I explore how ruins, both physical and metaphorical, can hold space for alternative trans futures, emerging through stillness, decay and refusal. Within the chapel, a vertical metal pole sculpture extends towards a hole in the ceiling. Supported by the metal structure and held in gravity rather than exertion, I suspend my body within the ruins.Still physically demanding, the performance moves away from strength, force and aggression towards endurance and stillness. I simply hang, stay vertical, and hold until I can’t anymore.

As an angel, demon, and topless priest, I transform into these characters, guided yet interrupted by the will of the trans gods. Religious symbols such as wings and angels sit alongside digitally generated creatures and digital billboard-style imagery drawn from protest slogans, religious rhetoric, and the visual language of global advertising.

Right wings are everywhere, but not in my church.
The concrete wall will one day be a story of the past.

Through 360° video, installation, sound and performance, I fade, multiply and crumble into the ruins. Propaganda, advertising, elements of science fiction, and religious belief sit side by side, disrupted to produce a space that is unstable, fractured, and open to multiple readings.

Within this space, transness operates not as a corrective force or a vision of linear progress, but as a departure toward what has been abandoned or collapsed.

Elevani (05’00”) <excerpt>

03 CAREMAXXING

group exhibition
2026

Xxijra Hii
London, UK

8 May — 6 June 2026

Curated by: Yuli Serfaty & Xxijra Hii

Artists: Arvida Byström, Romeo Roxman Gatt, Harrison Pearce, Reb Sangster

Exhibition text: Anitra Lourie

CAREMAXXIING takes the mechanization of care as both a cultural condition and a formal one. Care—with its histories of labour, bodies and collective life—is seized and run through the logic of maxxing: to hack the system, cheat the level and push one attribute to its absolute extreme.

The exhibition asks what care looks like when it passes through a system that was never designed for it, bringing together works made from its machinery: silicone and algorithms, paint and armor, text and treatment.

Exhibition text — Anitra Lourie

The shoulder pad becomes an accessory for the ruthless and glorified performance of manhood: protective gear that means you can hit harder, while the body itself is pressed into and shaped by what is meant to protect it.

Through sculpture, text and video, the works circle this paradox: the body crushed into a collective mold, armor as care, care as weapon, belonging as the price of protection.

Warrior Heart Gear (2), 2019

Installation View

Xifajk, 2025

I Carry You Like an Animal would do

Installation View

Snailhead (02’40”), 2022

I Carry You Like an Animal would do (04’50”), 2020 <excerpt>

04 HEAVY ROTATION

group exhibition
2025

3hd 2025: Vertigo
Creamcake
Haus der Visionäre
Berlin, Germany

2–5 October 2025

Artists: Emily Barker, Johannes Büttner, Joshua Woolford w/ Sippin’ T & Lie Ning, Romeo Roxman Gatt, Tirdad Hashemi, Soufia Erfanian, Zuzanna Czebatul

Documentation:ink Agop

Heavy Rotation takes its title from the broadcasting term for songs receiving repeated airplay, splitting the phrase apart to examine the opposing forces contained within it. “Heavy” suggests weight, intensity and immensity, while “rotation” suggests energetic but fixed motion.

The exhibition sits within the tension between gravity and orbit, asking how motion can exist without producing change, and how stillness does not necessarily mean stasis. Weight becomes the engine of an ongoing circulation

Exhibition text — Creamcake

Romeo Roxman Gatt’s butterfly sculptures, made from iron and inspired by automotive parts, stand as chimera warriors, shielding the room from oppression. Each functions as a portal to new becoming, offering care and companionship in an increasingly inhuman world driven by self-interest and profit.

Though not human, the sculptures meet this harshness with a strange tenderness: both gentle and menacing, protective and unsettling. They form part of a larger body of work from Mama’s Boy, drawing on the biological notion of the chimera—including bilateral gynandromorph butterflies—to reflect on non-binary existence.

These rare, asymmetrical creatures embody both transformation and stigma, mirroring the trans experience in its beauty and its societal misrepresentation.

Petalblade, 2025

Insatallation View

Angel Wings, 2021

Blue Pansy, 2021

05 SMOKE MACHINE, LION & JEEP

by Romeo Roxman Gatt
performance / video
2021—2024

Ballet of the Masses
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)
Berlin, Germany
2024

Previous performances:
La Capella, Barcelona — debut
Mimosa House, London
Rosa Kwir, Malta

Video: 17 min, 2021

Story: Romeo Roxman Gatt
Sound Production: Adrian Camilleri, co-produced with Romeo Roxman Gatt
Costume Design: Holly Knowles & Romeo Roxman Gatt
Filming, Lighting & Editing: Niels Plotard
Movement & Performance Coaching / Dramaturgy: Florinda Camilleri
Production Assistance: Florinda Camilleri

Performance first commissioned by: Lucia C. Pino for Makebelieve Neuromancer
Funded by: La Capella, Barcelona

Video commissioned by: Kupfer Project Space, London & Jeanette Gunnarsson
Video funded by: Jeanette Gunnarsson, Daisy Parris Limited & Romeo Roxman Gatt

Smoke Machine, Lion and Jeep opens with a letter to my younger self, performed on the turf of a football ground and in the smoky shadows of a club. I reflect on a childhood of feeling misunderstood and never quite belonging, reaching back with empathy and compassion to say that things will be alright—that there is not only one way to be a man, but many.

“There’s no need to stand and pee, the toilet seat remains clean.”

Throughout the performance, I become more comfortable in myself, eventually growing wings, taking flight and dancing with no holds barred. The transformation is set in motion, but it will never have an end. The caterpillar and butterfly continue to coexist and transform; the broken wings are always mending.

Through costume, I address the school uniform and the burden it can become for non-binary, gender non-conforming and trans children and young adults. As a symbol of conservative norms, the uniform becomes a controlling force whose repercussions can last a lifetime.

In Smoke Machine, Lion and Jeep, I reclaim the uniform, replacing memories of my younger self walking awkwardly through school corridors in a skirt with joyful flights and flutters.

Smoke Machine, Lion & Jeep (17’00”), 2021 <excerpt>

Smoke Machine, Lion & Jeep (film still)

Smoke Machine, Lion & Jeep (film still)

Original lyric artwork, written and sung for SML&J video work, 2021

06 MAMA’S BOY

solo exhibition
sculpture / painting / moving image / installation
2021

Rosa Kwir
Balzan, Malta

29 September — 27 October 2021

Curated by: Akis Kokkinos

Exhibition text — Akis Kokkinos

Mama’s Boy plays with the biological notion of chimera — organisms that consist of more than one genotype under the same body, also known as bilateral gynandromorphs.

Among other species, chimera butterflies are an example of non-binary animals existing in nature. These asymmetrical, weird and rare creatures carry contradictory connotations. The butterfly has often been a symbol of trans communities, highlighting the journey of body transformation and beauty, while chimeras can appear unnatural, alien, almost like monsters, reflecting the stigma and violence that the trans community has received from mass media.

The exhibition explores metamorphosis as an evolutionary process to unfold trans ecologies, embodied experience, memory and liminal time.

The viewer enters a scenographic environment, a room-sized cocoon acting as a space for collective transition, solidarity, resilience and protection. Scattered throughout the space, three human-size butterfly figures shield the room from enemies. Made of iron and inspired by car parts, these animistic sculptures are transformed into chimera warriors, deconstructing systems of oppression and creating new narratives of belonging.

In the final room, family archive, forgotten stuffed toys and footage from the artist’s childhood are presented alongside paintings and moving-image works, bringing together multiple temporalities, non-binary entanglements and kinship between the self and the other.

Reformed, reconfigured and undetermined, Mama’s Boy manifests the power of the vulnerable

Installation View

Brown Playboy, 2021

Blue Pansy & Cruiser, 2021

Cruiser, 2021

Trans Mercurial Vapor Bb, 2021

Take my Breast away (diptych), 2020

Angel Wings, 2021

Take my Breast away (diptych), 2020

Sorry Mum I Broke Your Flowers, 2021

I Need You, You, You, 2021

Sweet Home Chicago (05’42”), 1999 <excerpt>

But Love Left No Room For Hydration (04’07”), 2019 <excerpt>

07 MY WOMXN IS A GOD MY GOD IS A WOMXN

performance / sound / moving image / installation
2019–2020

Performance: Romeo Roxman Gatt
Sound: Romeo Roxman Gatt
Choreography: Romeo Roxman Gatt & Sim Gray
Moving Image: Romeo Roxman Gatt & Sim Gray
Filming: Sunny
Dancers: Romeo Roxman Gatt, Sim Gray, Chyrsso Cosmas, Eleni Papazoglou, Rosalind Wilson

Presented at:
Up Is A Relative Concept, FOLD Arts Lab, London, UK, 2019
ABSINTHE §3, Collective Ending, London, UK, 2019
Strangers in a Strange Land, MUŻA, Valletta, Malta, 2020

My Womxn is a God my God is a Womxn emerged from a period of navigating sexuality, femininity and masculinity, and an increasingly uncertain relationship to womanhood. Before understanding myself as trans, I was already questioning where I sat in relation to womanhood, while at the same time expressing an admiration for female strength, sexuality and power.

The use of “womxn” in the title belongs specifically to this moment. I used the term as a way of creating distance from a category I could not fully locate myself within, while still holding an attachment to and appreciation of the women and forms of femininity that shaped the work.

Structured through six songs — Intro, Horse, Bullet Train, Hag, Slut and Fly — the performance moves through different encounters with gender, sexuality, power and desire. The title begins as a repeated chant or mantra, before the songs move between strength and vulnerability, pleasure and pain, intimacy and rejection.

Figures and words traditionally used to diminish women are turned around. The hag becomes an older woman desired for her strength and elegance; the slut becomes a refusal of shame; and the witch becomes associated with sexuality, pleasure and escape. Joan of Arc sits alongside these figures as another image of female strength, persecution and defiance.

Gendered objects and historical figures structure the performance. Joan of Arc appears not only as a figure of persecution and female strength, but through her occupation of masculine codes — wearing men’s clothing and armour, riding on horseback and entering the traditionally male space of warfare. Her image offered a way of thinking about masculinity existing within, and being performed through, a body understood as female.

At the centre of the performance is a pommel horse, an apparatus belonging to men’s artistic gymnastics, which also draws on the image of Joan on horseback. Riding, swords, muscles and physical discipline run through Horse, bringing together the warrior, the athlete and the gendered body. By the end of the song, “Horse gets defeated by Jeep,” shifting from the horse towards another coded form of power: the car and the machine.

The broomstick enters through Hag. Welded from metal and chrome-sprayed, its main body is shaped to resemble a car silencer. The witch’s broom becomes a kind of vehicle: something ridden and something that flies, crossed with the language and imagined sound of the car — broom / vroom. Lifted and ridden by the performers, it moves between domestic object, machine, sexuality, pleasure and escape.

Five performers move around these objects while songs, moving image, paintings and sculpture construct the space. Across the work, masculinity and femininity continually move into one another rather than remaining opposites. Looking back, the work captures a moment of distance from womanhood without disavowing it — questioning my own place within it while holding an admiration for female strength, sexuality and resistance, and already searching for other ways masculinity might be inhabited.

My Womxn is a God my God is a Womxn — 6-part video work (20’28”), 2019 <excerpt>

08 PERFICTION

sculpture / painting / moving image / installation / performance
2018–2019

Solo exhibition
Harlesden High Street
London, UK
13 December 2018 – February 2019

Curated by: Jonny Tanna

Exhibition text: Juliette Desorgues

Perfiction, my first solo exhibition, began with the car as an object loaded with masculinity, desire, consumerism and power. Rather than presenting the vehicle intact, I dismantled it. Doors, bonnets, steering wheels, seatbelts, silencers and other fragments were scattered and reassembled throughout the exhibition, becoming parts of bodies, paintings, sculptures and propositions for something else.

The exhibition unfolded like the aftermath of a collision — between hardness and vulnerability, fiction and lived experience, romantic desire and emotional pain. Materials associated with protection, speed and masculine strength were repeatedly made soft, wounded or unstable. In Warrior Heart Gear, protective sports equipment becomes a silicone body with nipples and hair; elsewhere a deployed airbag, seatbelt, car bonnet and silencer are removed from their original functions and made to carry intimacy, humour and loss.

Language runs throughout Perfiction. Phrases including Filling me Empty, Neverlast, Pain[ting] and You’re my Perfictionappear as titles and are engraved, embroidered or inscribed onto objects. Borrowing the directness of advertising and branding, these fragments behave like slogans but speak instead about longing, failure, protection and giving up.

Cars, sports equipment and industrial materials sit alongside hair, silicone, fabric, embroidery and images of the body. In Dead Like Tinky Winky, a BMW E30 bonnet becomes an angel-like queer totem; in Defender | Protector, a three-point harness associated with safety and restraint is attached to a painting carrying language about letting go.

Across sculpture, painting, moving image and performance, Perfiction uses the seductive surfaces of consumer and macho culture to expose something more fragile underneath. The exhibition treats the wreckage of these objects almost like the wreckage of a love story — broken apart, sentimental, absurd and still trying to protect itself.

Installation View

Defender | Protector, 2018

Silencer[ed], 2018

Dead like Tinky Winky, 2018

Pain[ting], 2018

You’re my Perfiction, 2018

When the Beautiful Cat Attacked it Hurt Bad, 2018

CTRL ME, 2018

Filling me Empty, 2018

Like a Tragedy from 16th Century but Baby we R Contemporary, 2018

Warrior Heart Gear, 2018

Be My Woman, 2017

Could have been a Hollywood Movie Ending part [2]

Could have been a Hollywood Movie Ending (08’46”), 2018 <excerpt>

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