Ursula Biemann, Sahara Chronicle, (video still), 2006-2007. © Copyright the artist.

Port City, the international touring exhibition and project addressing issues of global migration, trade and contemporary slavery has opened at the John Hansard Gallery at the University of Southampton.

Running until January 26 2008 the exhibition features several artworks in different media that each draw attention to the experience of migration, in particular between North Africa and the so-called ‘Fortress Europe’.

Melanie Jackson, The Undesirables, 2007. Courtesy the artist. Photo: John Melville.

A video installation by Ursula Biemann, Sahara Chronicle, is a riveting look at migration routes across the Sahara desert, filmed over three years in Niger, Mauritania and Morocco, whilst Yto Barrada’s photographic series Sleepers presents images from her home town of Tangiers, where would-be émigrés await their moment of passage.

Other highlights of the exhibition include a vast model of an imaginary global cityscape made from sugar by Meschac Gaba, featuring some of the world’s most iconic buildings.

Yto Barrada, Sleepers, 2006. Courtesy the artist.

Sweetness also includes specially commissioned Southampton landmarks including the historic Bargate, as voted for by residents of the city.

Melanie Jackson’s intricate paper installation The Undesirables responds to the narratives of dock workers that she interviewed and to media representations of the wreck of the MSC Napoli that foundered off Branscombe, in Devon, last year.

In the Gallery Reading Room Mary Evans’ Blighty, Guinea, Dixie displays a number of kaleidoscopes showing contemporary scenes from the triangle of the transatlantic slave trade.

Meschac Gaba, Sweetness, 2006. © Copyright the artist. Photo: John Melville.

In addition, the Maghreb Connection Screening Programme also features within the exhibition and comprises a series films and documentary works by artists including Raphael Cuomo, Valeriano Lopez Dominguez, Charles Heller and Angela Sanders who each explore migratory movements within Europe and North Africa.

Port City is curated by Tom Trevor, Director of Arnolfini and funded by Arts Council England, Grants for the Arts and the European Commission Culture 2007. The Maghreb Connection Screening Programme is curated by Ursula Biemann. The exhibition tours to the Liverpool Biennial 2008.