Project Description

Parallel Borders 2 / Landfall (2014 -) proposes a series of parallel platforms composed of visual and textual contributions, site-specific projects and collaborations with artists, architects, writers, filmmakers and other contemporary practitioners whose research and work are connected to the Middle East.
Reflecting upon complexities of borders and territoriality, referencing a multitude of rich and diverse historical contexts, this collective platform questions ideas of physical and metaphorical narratives via collaborative and discursive meditations on this land and people founded upon relationships to archiving of historical, visual and philosophical connections to time, place and culture.
Chronicling ideas of architecture and community, power and fracture and powerful symbols representing the landscape: the road, the tree, the field, the sea, the river, the desert, the hill and the mountain, in contrast with social and political urbanization, a visual and textual trajectory is created.
Mapping spaces and narratives through stories and documents, Parallel Borders manifests the physical in virtual flux as a borderless and accessible platform setting out to interrogate parameters of the designed, democratised and social nature of digital space through a cumulative, adaptable and renewable structure.

Project Resume

Malta Contemporary Art is a research platform for contemporary visual culture via an exploration of diverse curatorial practices.
Founded in Malta in 2008 as a geographically specific project space by artist and curator Mark Mangion it has since transformed into an itinerant and virtual project proposing several international projects in various parts of the world via the collaborative platform entitled Parallel Borders.
Since 2008 MCA has collaborated with over 100 artists and other professionals in over 25 exhibitions, projects and events including Simon Starling, Cyprien Gaillard, Spartacus Chetwynd, Douglas White, Jess Flood-Paddock &HarisEpaminonda.

Parallel Borders is an extensive cross-field collaborative platform reflecting upon geopolitical and spatial narratives and physical borders via cyber, public and other highly accessible public structures.
A series of collaborations were initiated in 2012, generating a discourse with a diversity of artists and practitioners, invited to contribute to an explorative platform of site-specific fieldwork in various regions around the world, questioning ideas of cross-field dialogue through visual culture. A journey was embarked upon, creating a foundation for historical research and anthropological mapping, storytelling and geo-political cultural examination against a backdrop of a deflating capitalism, environmental instability, technological revolution and ideas and disputes of borders; physical, territorial, scientific, philosophical.
The first edition of Parallel Borders (2012 – 2014) involved a series of projects located in major cities across Europe from Athens to Reykjavik questioning ideas of monument and power at the end of 2012.