Bouchra Khalili

Bouchra Khalili (born 1975 in Casablanca) is a French-Moroccan artist. She graduated in Film & Media Studies at Sorbonne Nouvelle and Visual Arts at the Ecole Nationale d’Arts de Paris-Cergy.

Work Khalili works across different media including film, video, installation, photography, works on paper, textile, and editorial platforms. Her multidisciplinary practice suggests civic imaginations that can allow us to envision other ways of belonging. Film and video play a central role in her thinking. Known for complex and multilayered narrative constructions, Khalili’s filmic works draw on suppressed historical moments of collective emancipation that span diverse histories, geographies, and generations. Neither documentary nor fiction, her deeply researched “hypotheses” articulate language, oral transmission, poetic invocations, storytelling, and innovative visual forms. Experimenting with montage, Khalili’s editing process is a key tool of her narration techniques. In her films, the non-professional performers are, at the same time, the film’s storytellers and “editors”. They narrate and act out textual and visual constellations of unarchived stories of collective emancipation that were suppressed by official narratives. Putting together fragments of oral histories with personal testimonies, texts, photographs, and moving images, they dynamically activate the past while revealing its connections to the present. Summoning poetically the ghosts of unachieved promises, Khalili’s films invite viewers to become the witnesses of our history and to contemplate our potential collective future.

Accordingly, with precision and subtlety, her projects challenge hegemonic narratives about migration and statelessness, as well as the violence they engender and normalize, while also pressing contemporary art practice forward, both ethically and aesthetically.

In Khalili's video workThe Mapping Journey Project (2008-11), 8 people who have experienced displacement due to economic, political or social reasons recount their journeys around the Mediterranean. The artist said that the work is about the question: "How can we form communities that are free from the restrictive ideas of belonging shaped by the nation-state model?" 2015: Foreign Office. A mixed media project composed of a digital film, a series of photographs, and a silkscreen print 2014: Garden Conversation. Digital film. 18minutes 2012-2013: The Speeches Series. 3 digital films 2012: The Seaman. Digital film 2012: The Wet Feet Series. Series of photographs 2011: The Constellations Series. Series of 8 silkscreen prints 2008-2011: The Mapping Journey Project. Video installation. 8 single channels

Selected publications and catalogues

2023: Between Circles and Constellations. Monograph Book. Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona 2021: Stories Within Stories. Monograph Book. Hatje Cantz 2019: The Tempest Society. Monograph Book. Book Works 2018: Bouchra Khalili - Blackboard. Monograph Book. Jeu de Paume 2015: Bouchra KHALILI - Foreign Office. Monograph Book. Sam Art Projects Collection, 12 2014: Here & Elsewhere. Edited by Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari, and Natalie Bell, with Negar Azimi and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie. New Museum, New York 2014: Freedom, KunstPalais Edition, Erlangen, Germany 2013: The Encyclopedic Palace: Guide Book, 55th Venice Biennale. Venice Biennale Foundation 2013: The Encyclopedic Palace: Catalogue, 55th Venice Biennale. Venice Biennale Foundation 2013: 5th Moscow Biennale, Catherine de Zegher, Moscow Biennale Foundation 2013: Mirages d'Orient, Grenades et Figues de Barbarie, Ed. Actes Sud Beaux-Arts 2012: Intense Proximity, the guidebook. Centre national des arts plastiques – Artlys 2012: Intense Proximity, the anthology. Centre national des arts plastiques – Artlys 2011: Mutations, perspectives on photography. Steidl/Paris Photo, 2011 2011: Plot for a Biennial. Sharjah Art Foundation 2010: Bouchra Khalili - Story Mapping. Monograph Book. Le Bureau des Compétences et Désirs/Presses du Réel