On the Border of Time, Une relève méditerranéenne brings together sixteen artists, graduates of the Beaux-Arts of Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, and the south of France. Working across disciplines, their practices take shape in relation to the Mediterranean—as a point of address that informs their concerns and from which they speak.

The two titles frame a dual perspective: one contextual, the other conceptual. Une relève méditerranéenne points to the generation and the geography, whereas On the Border of Time borrows from a phrase used by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge to describe a threshold where continuity no longer holds: a space that is at once near and distant. The works emerge from this condition, between a past that appears in partial and shifting forms, a present-future shaped by forces that exceed it. The Mediterranean, often imagined as a homogenized field, thus becomes a site of temporal and spatial negotiation. Its waters, movements, and layered histories are not mere subjects of representation. They are interlocutors.

Across the exhibition, questions of movement and threshold recur: states of in-betweenness, the inheritance and transformation of memory, the entanglement of history and myth, and the place of non-human life within these narratives. Each work exists as a distinct event, grounded in its own set of conditions, without being subsumed into a larger narrative. As such, the exhibition operates from a logic of encounters rather than grouping, resisting the impulse to bind the works to their pre-established geography or to expressions of fixed identities.

Freed from this task of representation, the works shift from describing the world to structuring the conditions in which it can be reconfigured. They form an ensemble in which their attunement to one another emerges through their shared condition, the ground from within which the works operate: discontinuity.

We encounter the final days of a Camargue fighting bull; a re-staging of Napoleon's campaign in Egypt; sun-bleached photographs from a family album left behind; a suspended crown of entangled bodies; a moment of doubt in a Lebanese cemetery; sculptures that move between lived experience and myth; the bruises left by a possible crossing; and the Thirty-Six Righteous struggling to maintain equilibrium.

Through fragmented accounts, re-enactments, and speculative gestures, the exhibition asks: what happens to meaning, memory, and knowledge when continuity can no longer be assumed, when the thread breaks?

The works are accompanied by a discursive event: a transcribed group conversation in which the artists unfold the thought processes behind the works, further anchoring this relève méditerranéenne both as a provisional counter-archive, and as an invitation to hold open the border of time.

With :
Oumayma Abouzid Souali
Anouch Basbous
Mounia Bouchra
Francesco Canova
Noémie Cartailler-Combe
Alexia Croset
Houssem Harrak
Gil Lekh
Oualid Lazrak
Christina Maalouf
Oussama Mahdhi
Maëva Pillon
Achraf Saadi
Loutfi Souidi
Fella Tamzali
Amir Youssef

The exhibition is curated by Soukaina Aboulaoula

The exhibition is presented by Parallèle in collaboration with L'École(s) du Sud and four partners from the MIRAMAR program: the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (Lebanon), DARET (Morocco), the National Institute of Fine Arts of Tetouan (Morocco), and Les Ateliers Sauvages (Algeria). It is co-organized by the Institut français as part of the Mediterranean Season, the Institut français of Algeria, the Institut français of Morocco, the Institut français of Lebanon, the PACA Regional Directorate for Cultural Affairs (DRAC) as part of the Culture Pro program, the member schools of the L'École(s) du Sud network, and in coproduction with La Friche la Belle de Mai.