The Border That Crossed Me - Azzedine Saleck

The Border That Crossed Me is a multi-sensory collaborative exhibition exploring surveillance technology, border infrastructures, and climate-induced migration. This exhibition has been devised for the Golden Thread Gallery in collaboration with FLAX Artist Studios, Belfast and Azzedine Saleck.

Presented in our Upper Gallery, The Border That Crossed Me examines the political and emotional geographies of divided territories across the globe. Drawing from research that Saleck began in 2022, the project focuses on five contemporary border sites: the Mexico–US border, the Eurotunnel zone near Calais, Ceuta and Melilla, the Belfast Peace Walls, and the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

At the core of the exhibition is a dynamic video installation that responds to the presence of visitors using a facial recognition system. Rather than reinforcing control, the work subverts surveillance technologies to generate new, constantly shifting spatial arrangements, inviting viewers to reflect on how borders are both enforced and felt.

Fixed-frame videos of border walls are paired with texts that were created in workshops with young people living on either side of these divides. Themes of displacement, resilience, travel, and waiting emerge in soundscapes woven from these personal contributions, offering an intimate counterpoint to the abstraction of border policy.

Additional visual elements, including textiles and ceramics referencing both Western and Eastern traditions, evoke the fragility of memory and the possibility of rewriting dominant narratives of today. As visitors move through the space, the work becomes a site of erosion, inscription, and hopefully, quiet resistance.

The Border That Crossed Me is an exhibition that hopes to offer a space of reflection, revealing the personal and collective realities of borders, where policy meets poetry, and surveillance is reimagined as a tool for transformation.

This exhibition has been supported by Fluxus Art Projects.

With thanks to Édouard Glissant Art Fund

Bio:

Azzedine Saleck is a poet and an artist currently living between Paris and Nouakchott. Of Mauritanian and American descent, raised in Mauritania and France, Azzedine Saleck captures the complexity of fragmented cultural influences at the intersection between language and form. Saleck has exhibited at the Gulbenkian Foundation, Paris, and the Confort Moderne, Poitiers, Southard Reid gallery in London, and the artist run space Treize in Paris, Villa Arson in Nice and Centre Pompidou in Paris.

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