Para, Boston, 2016

Mischa Kuball has created a site-related projection installation for the Paramount Urban Screen that he calls Para. For this video installation Kuball has documented public settings such as office buildings, corporate sites and private condos throughout his worldwide travels. He hasrecorded the global architecture of corporate culture in the hearts of cities at night, when their illuminated emptiness transforms them into faceless designs that can be found anywhere and everywhere around the globe. 

The anonymous sites in urban centers suggest with their night lighting that they are in business, yet quite the opposite is the reality.

Across the Paramount Urban Screen, the denizens of the night will witness sweeping views of architectural shells that are transformed into canisters of urban light. Active sites of business during the work day, they become anonymous sites at night, that despite their night lighting are hollow, glowing ghosts. From the Paramount Urban Screen a projector will illuminate the empty office floor across the street, lighting up the unused room. Thus the definition of Para= “alongside (parathyroid); beyond; outside of; closely related to or resembling (paratyphoid).” The artist has not identified the sources of his projected images, but one can understand his intention is to force questions about the paradigmatic changes of the humancondition in our modern, urban night existence. For whom have these buildings been made? Are they just self-fulfilling players in an urban game?

Mischa Kuball’s art practice has emphasized the psychological components of human interaction with urban space since the late 1970s. Para is part of a series of public works compiled by Vanessa Joan Mueller for the publication, Public Preposition.