Teresa Busuttil (b. 1993) is a visual artist living and working between Malta and Tarntanya/Adelaide, South Australia.
Her practice explores how memory is held and transmitted. Blending personal stories, family history and fantasy through multidisciplinary forms of art that includes sculpture, installation and moving images. She draws from kitsch aesthetic and religious iconography to explore dualities and contradictions present in personal and political history, emotional and cultural inheritance, time and memory.
Busuttil was selected for Primavera 2024: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. In the same year, she undertook a major commission for the Malta Biennale of Art, Frejgatina (2024).
In 2023, she was invited to present a solo exhibition, Asleep with the Fishes, at Firstdraft, Sydney as a studio tennent with Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE) Studio Program.
Other recent exhibitions include Stranger than Fiction, West Space, Melbourne (2024); Passage, Murray Art Museum Albury, NSW (2024); and Studios 2023 ACE, Adelaide (2023).
contact
teresawbusuttil@gmail.com
Her practice explores how memory is held and transmitted. Blending personal stories, family history and fantasy through multidisciplinary forms of art that includes sculpture, installation and moving images. She draws from kitsch aesthetic and religious iconography to explore dualities and contradictions present in personal and political history, emotional and cultural inheritance, time and memory.
Busuttil was selected for Primavera 2024: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. In the same year, she undertook a major commission for the Malta Biennale of Art, Frejgatina (2024).
In 2023, she was invited to present a solo exhibition, Asleep with the Fishes, at Firstdraft, Sydney as a studio tennent with Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE) Studio Program.
Other recent exhibitions include Stranger than Fiction, West Space, Melbourne (2024); Passage, Murray Art Museum Albury, NSW (2024); and Studios 2023 ACE, Adelaide (2023).
contact
teresawbusuttil@gmail.com
Select Recent Publications
2025
2026 Samstag Scholarship
Between shorelines and personal origins, Teresa Busuttil’s multidisciplinary practice casts the sea as mirror, archive and connective force.
Essay written by Patrice Sharkey, October 2025.
2024
“Teresa Busuttil [...] attempts to better understand the migrant flow across bodies of water. Her practice has been defined by interpreting and experimenting with what holds
and hosts memory. Moving between film and sculpture, Busuttil’s material exploration has focused on blurring the lines between history and lore, revisiting sites of experience and connecting them to broader notions of time, ritual, migration and assimilation.”
Myth and Memory - Rayleen Forester
“Making is Busuttil’s way of understanding and shaping her personal and familial identity. She is a collector and a magnet for the pretty and kitsch, creating instinctively and for her own delight.”
Forming the present — Lucy Latella
Joanna Kitto: On Storytelling and Subversion
2022
“you will spend such a long time thumbing for tender places. pull open maps google ancestry charts unravel on your therapist’s couch look at the mirror, stare for a long time at the small angles of your eyebrows thinking of where you came from.
that is what we are doing here. essaying how to place your fingers at the source of the pain how to untendril yourself from what trails behind, what clings to you, what you cling to.”
in water bodies, Melanie Pryor