Terminal Frontiers is a series of artists’ works that ask oblique questions about how the human experience of asylum and migration connects to the politics of local and global conflicts. Using video, installation and digital techniques, these five new art works respond to those forces which generate the Refugee while denying their reality and existence.  A journey which explores human notions of landless exile and collectively places us as global participants.

Led by the two key works “Local/Stranger” and “What If I’m Not Real”, this is a major collaborative digital art project by a diverse range of artists and collaborators.  It breaks the boundaries of artistic labels and cultural practice, ranging from Tang Dynasty poetry to interactive software programming, and an equally broad range of creators from internationally recognised artists to asylum seekers and school students.

Complex issues, such as migration and refuge, generate complex emotions. Complex questions demand complex answers. The simple headlines and ‘obvious’ solutions which assault us from the news stand every day conflate and distort our thinking. We go shopping, while the majority world goes hungry. The journey to understanding begins by resistance to the colonisation of our thinking space, our mental environment. Terminal Frontiers is a measured, elegant and passionate set of inter-related art works that refuses to hide behind easy rhetoric and does not accept any agendas other than its own.

               
"What If..." installation at Castlefield Gallery                                 Terminal Frontiers at the ICA           

“Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the visual tactics of Virtual Migrants represent a new kind of artistic engagement for a new century. These artists examine aspects of the current times, but cannot (and choose not to) do so in ways that are disinterested. Instead, they locate their own experiences at the heart of their practice. In turn, the collective practice of these artists is located at the apex where differing ideas of the ‘migrant’ meet, separate, and overlap.  The broad sweeps of migration, displacement, belonging, and home are approached via the convincing and compelling vehicle of the artists’ individual stories and personal experiences. The personal and the political deeply intertwined.”

- Eddie Chambers, Curator & Writer of Art Criticism 

A Terminal Frontiers publication incorporating a DVD-ROM will be available in 2005/06