Itinerant and multidisciplinary, the work of Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili resists easy classification. Her solo exhibition Bouchra Khalili: Between Circles and Constellations, curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, remains on display at the Sharjah Art Foundation until the end of the year. Staunchly dedicated to raising the voices of under-represented and stateless persons, Khalili insists that their narratives make urgent and specific demands upon our collective imagination: can we envision a world that views itself as being held in common, rather than defined through difference and exclusion?
FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ Starting from the title of your exhibition — and in particular, from ‘circles’ and ‘constellations’ —can you tell us what these terms mean for you? How do theyconnect with the hidden narratives of solidarities among transnational and stateless communities?
BOUCHRA KHALILI Circles and constellations have been regular patterns in my work, operating as both visual motifs and metaphors.The constellation functions as a proposal, within which no one narrative prevails over and it is also a metaphor of the inner logic that structures my practice of ‘montage’. Montage refers here to the conceptual, intellectual, and visual practice of film editing. It relies on creating connections including between distant elements. Sometimes they might have nothing obvious to do with each other, but if you find the connection — if you invent the connection — they begin to interact. When I work on an exhibition, that’s how I approach it. I make a proposal for a constellation that suggests a path but I don’t actually sign-post it. The constellation can be approached from any side. Constellations are the translation — in the form of sky-maps — of mythological narratives, allowing seafarers to locate themselves where no landmarks exist. In that sense, constellations are timeless narratives that nevertheless allow us to still locate ourselves.
In Morocco, the circle is the pattern formed by the community of listeners gathering around the storyteller. It originally refers to an ancient tradition of storytelling in Morocco, one that goes back to the ninth century. It is called al-halaqa, which also means ‘circle’, ‘ring’, or ‘assembly’. The stories narrated by the storyteller are literally a montage of various materials, spanning from oral poetry to classical tales. Within this circle, there are constellations of stories but also constellations of people from different milieu.
In the exhibition at Sharjah Art Foundation, the design of the exhibition includes these motifs at multiple levels, from display — as they structure the exhibition — to their presence in the artworks. For example, there are works that are literally titled The Constellations (2011) and The Circle (2023). Although both works were produced at different moments, they both ask the same question: how can we make a better shared world?
KOOZ Your works are collaborations with members of communities rendered invisible by the nation-state. What role does process hold within your practice? To what extent does the work exist in between the personal and the collective?
BK The question of the personal and the collective is approached in my work through the position of the ‘civic poet’. I encountered the term for the first time through my reading of Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini’s civic poet is the one who speaks in the first-person singular for the voice of the collective. When I encountered Pasolini’s civic poet, it immediately reminded me of the function of the public storyteller in Morocco.
In my filmic works, my collaborators act as civic poets. They speak in the first-person singular and simultaneously, they articulate a collective voice. A multitude is implicitly represented while remaining invisible. The Tempest Society (2017), Twenty-Two Hours (2018), and Foreign Office (2015) rely on a duo or trio of young people, who are not performers but who perform themselves. At the same time they are conscious that they speak for absentees, for the ones who can no longer speak, but also for the ones who may speak from the future. What they are addressing is the potential future itself, as much as the potential community they are forming. And in that plurality of voices, a potential vision emerges for a collective or community to come into being.
Within the context of an exhibition, the community is brought together by the civic poets populating my works. This community is made by the visitors of the exhibition, who witness these stories that speak to them in the present momentwhile already addressing a potential future.
The question of the personal and the collective is approached in my work through the position of the ‘civic poet’.
KOOZ You have explored a multiplicity of formats, spanning film, photography, print and textiles. What prompted such an extensive set of tools and how do they explore the act of storytelling? How far is the medium part of the message?
BK I do indeed work with various media but I also use various media within media — meaning that photographs, still images, even textiles and objects are often part of my filmic works. For example, The Magic Lantern (2019-2022), a mixed media installation that comprises a video installation, prints, textile, and objects, connects the history of projected imagery as form of storytelling with the birth of handy video making as a feminist practice. The piece originates from the Phantasmagoria, a magic lantern invented by Robertson (an inventor and illusionist) who used it for staging performances in the 1790s. Those performances were rituals for the Parisian people for mourning the death of recently deceased leaders of the French Revolution — such as Roberspierre, Marat or Danton. Robertson claimed that his machine had the power to make “ghosts speak in public”. My piece starts with the birth of Robertson’s phantasmagoria and traces a genealogy of ‘spectrologies’ that includes photography and cinema, culminating with the birth of ‘handy video’ with the Sony Portapak in the late 1960s and its use by pioneer of video-making Carole Roussopoulos, who appeared in previous works of mine such as Foreign Office (2015) and Twenty-Two Hours (2018).
In The Magic Lantern, the transition from the late-18th century’s phantasmagorias to Carole’s use of a Portapak sits within a depiction of a series of historical events throughout the 19th century. These events propelled the use of magic lanterns from a ‘revolutionary technology for revolutionaries’ to a mainstream formof entertainment that eventually served in popularising colonial expansion. In the first part, The Magic Lantern historicises the reactionary appropriation of this technology, as well as attempts to resurrect its original emancipatory vocation. The apparition of Carole and her Portapak is thus contextualised within this conflict, between the colonial continuum and a tradition of emancipatory forms of filmmaking.This process of self-reflexivity is also mirrored in the exhibition installation; for instance, the projection devices in the physical space are also the very same ones seenin the projected image.In The Magic Lantern — as in most of my works — I meditate on the ontology of image-making as a technology for producing rituals of storytelling that are capable, in the present moment,of causing the ‘ghosts of the future’ to speak in public.
KOOZ On the idea of storytelling, between the individual and the collective, I was mesmerised by the Mapping Journey Project (currently on show at the Venice Biennale) which traces the convoluted journeys of eight anonymous individuals, whose covert journeys have taken them throughout the Mediterranean basin. As Europe continues to grapple with uncertainty regarding migration policies, what is the importance of these stories?
BK As with all of my works, the collaborators in the Mapping Journey Project are ‘civic poets’. In that sense, I don’t see them as migrants but as citizens whose civic rights and right to mobility are denied. If one shifts the paradigm and ceases to view them as migrants, then one understands that the videos are not narrations of their testimonies. In fact, their testimony is not in what they are saying; rather, they bear witness to the fact that they survived their perilous journeys. In doing so, they also bear witness to the fact that another life has begun — that they are therefore engaged in a new struggle, one made for equal rights within another society. In this sense, these stories ask questions of us: how can we build a new civic imagination that would not proceed by exclusion, without defining who can and who cannot belong.
In this sense, these stories ask questions of us: how can we build a new civic imagination that would not proceed by exclusion, without defining who can and who cannot belong.
KOOZ As the concluding chapter of the Mapping Journey Project, The Constellation Series reinterprets the narration of journeys made across the Mediterranean. It proposes a view freed of landmarks and borders, in which cosmic routes run in parallel with the excruciating journeys across land and sea. Can you speak about this interpolation,between the celestial and geopolitical realms?
BK I have been fascinated by astronomy and maps since my childhood. In fact, the first image that really held importance for me was a picture of Al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana (c.1154) that I encountered as a child, in history books. Most of Al-Idrisi’s sources were a combination of scientific observations collected by Al-Idrisi and his collaborators, with descriptions that could possibly be defined as folktales or even fictions, as theystrongly relied on storytelling as performed by explorers and seafarers. For centuries, seafarers have used constellations for centuries as navigational tools, to orient themselves in a space without visible landmarks; such narratives originate in ancient storytelling, like Greek mythology.
The beauty of the Tabula Rogeriana and its opening map also resides in the narratives it suggests, with its exquisite calligraphy and drawings. Unlike most of the maps with which we are familiar, this one literally appears to be upside down. As in some of the earliest maps from the Muslim world, it was produced by a scholar whose gaze was ‘decentred’ before the word even entered our vocabulary. In that sense, working and thinking with and through constellations came quite naturally to me. Inspired by Al Idrisi’s work, I try to decentre my own perception of things so as to ask the question: what mightglobal geography look like if inscribed by the hands of the most vulnerable ones?This leads to a poetic projection of another world, where sea and sky are blurred; where we follow the paths of precarious lives so as to find landmarks to relate to each other. To quote the words of the poet Edouard Glissant, it suggests a poetics of relation.
Inspired by Al Idrisi’s work, I try to decentre my own perception of things so as to ask the question: what might global geography look like if inscribed by the hands of the most vulnerable ones?
KOOZ Ultimately, the exhibition itself bears witness to what you call ‘radical citizenship’. What role can art play in working towards this unconditional conception of community, freed from normative notions of identity?
BK Art — and more specifically, the experience of art — allows us to picture other ways to belong. In my views of art-making and exhibition-making, we can become ‘citizens of poetry’ — to paraphrase the words of Algerian poet Jean Sénac, who hoped that post-independence Algeria would welcome a nation made of ‘citizens of beauty’. Art shows us what brings us together and by doing that, art can also bring us together, just as in the old tradition of public storytelling in Morocco. Ultimately, if I still believe in the transformative power of art, it is certainly because it allows us to picture the invisible, constellation-like circle that connects us all.
Bios
Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-French visual artist who is based in Vienna and works itinerantly. Khalili’s multidisciplinary practice develops collaborative strategies of storytelling with members of communities excluded from citizenship. Combining oral traditions with visual and sonic forms informed by post-independence avant-gardes and conceptual practices, Khalili formulates hypotheses for new emancipatory forms of belonging. Khalili’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions including MACBA, Barcelona; Luma Foundation, Arles; Bildmuseet Umeå; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has also participated in the Venice Biennale, Sharjah Biennial and documenta 14, amongst other events. Khalili is a founding member of La Cinémathèque de Tanger, an artist-run non-profit organisation in Morocco.
Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Prior to dedicating her full attention to KoozArch, Federica collaborated with the architecture studio and non-profit agency for change UNA/UNLESS working on numerous cultural projects and the research of "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.
