WE ARE HERE NOW
2007
In 2007, Mark Mangion presented WE ARE HERE NOW as part of Forbidden Spectacle, an exhibition held at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Malta.
At first glance, the work appeared almost imperceptible within the flow of the exhibition opening. Five recently arrived migrants from Togo, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo were invited to attend the event, moving through the museum and engaging visitors in conversation. There was no stage, no scripted performance, and no visible distinction between participant and audience. The work unfolded through ordinary social interaction. Yet it is precisely this apparent simplicity that gave the piece its critical force.
Presented within a museum whose collection was largely composed of European art spanning the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, WE ARE HERE NOW introduced into the institution a set of contemporary subjects whose histories, experiences, and identities were conspicuously absent from its displays. Rather than adding new objects to the museum's collection, Mangion inserted living presences into its social and symbolic framework. The work shifted attention from what was represented on the walls to who was present within the space itself.
The title, WE ARE HERE NOW, functions simultaneously as statement, affirmation, and political demand. Its directness is significant. It neither asks for recognition nor seeks permission. Instead, it asserts a condition of presence. The phrase challenges the mechanisms through which certain populations become socially visible while others remain marginalised or excluded. Within the context of Malta's increasingly prominent role as a point of arrival for migrants crossing the Mediterranean during the early 2000s, the work addressed a rapidly changing social reality that was often discussed through the language of crisis, security, and administration rather than through direct human encounter.
Mangion's intervention can be understood through the lens of institutional critique, yet it departs from earlier forms of the genre that focused primarily on exposing the ideological structures of museums and galleries. Rather than analysing the institution from a distance, WE ARE HERE NOW activated the museum as a social arena. The work transformed the exhibition opening into a space where the politics of representation became embodied and immediate. The museum ceased to function solely as a repository of historical objects and became instead a site of encounter between different lived realities.
The significance of the work lies in its refusal to turn its participants into images. Contemporary art has often struggled with the representation of migration, displacement, and marginalised communities, risking the reduction of individuals to symbols of political issues. Mangion avoids this trap by resisting spectacle altogether. The migrants involved in the performance were not displayed, documented, or aestheticised. They were not asked to perform their identities or recount narratives of suffering for an audience. Instead, they occupied the museum as social subjects capable of initiating conversations, sharing experiences, and engaging others on equal terms.
This strategy recalls the ethical concerns that have emerged around socially engaged and participatory art practices since the 1990s. Rather than producing representation, the work produced conditions for relation. The artwork existed in the conversations themselves, in moments of uncertainty, curiosity, discomfort, and recognition. Visitors encountering participants may not initially have realised they were engaging with the artwork at all. This ambiguity became central to the work's operation, dissolving the distinction between art experience and social experience.
At the same time, WE ARE HERE NOW reveals the limits of visibility as a political category. Visibility alone does not guarantee inclusion or equality. The migrants were physically present within one of Malta's principal cultural institutions, yet their presence simultaneously exposed the structures through which certain bodies are historically excluded from cultural narratives. The museum's collection, like many European institutions, reflects particular histories of power, nationhood, and cultural value. Against this backdrop, the participants' presence functioned as a reminder that contemporary European identity is inseparable from histories of movement, migration, colonialism, and global interconnection.
The juxtaposition between contemporary migrant subjects and historical European artworks generated a productive tension. The museum's collection represented centuries of cultural continuity and identity formation, while the participants embodied contemporary realities often perceived as external to those narratives. By bringing these two temporalities into direct contact, Mangion disrupted the illusion of historical closure that museums frequently project. History appeared not as a completed narrative but as an ongoing process shaped by new arrivals, new voices, and unresolved questions of belonging.
The work's most powerful gesture may be its insistence on presence as a form of resistance. In a political climate where migrants are frequently reduced to statistics, policy debates, or media images, WE ARE HERE NOW foregrounded the irreducibility of individual encounter. The participants occupied the museum not as objects of knowledge but as agents within a shared social space. Their presence challenged viewers to reconsider assumptions about citizenship, identity, and cultural ownership.
More than fifteen years after its presentation, WE ARE HERE NOW remains strikingly relevant. Questions surrounding migration, borders, visibility, and belonging continue to shape political and cultural discourse across Europe and the Mediterranean. Yet the work avoids easy moral conclusions. Instead, it creates a situation in which these questions emerge through lived interaction rather than representation. Its criticality lies not in what it shows but in what it makes possible.
Ultimately, WE ARE HERE NOW transformed the museum into a temporary public sphere in which the politics of presence could be directly experienced. Through a minimal intervention, Mangion exposed the relationship between visibility and exclusion, history and contemporaneity, institution and society. The work stands as a subtle yet profound exploration of how art can intervene in social reality—not by speaking on behalf of others, but by creating the conditions through which new forms of encounter, recognition, and coexistence might emerge.