Bouchra Khalili: Blackboard

The Jeu de Paume is presenting an extensive survey of work by French-Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili (b. Casablanca, 1975). The artist’s films, video installations, photographs and silkscreen prints suggest civic platforms, from which members of minorities perform their strategies of resistance to arbitrary power.

Through her artworks, Bouchra Khalili articulates subjectivity and collective history, questionning the complex relationships between the singular and civic belonging, calling for a new collective voice to come into being. Her solo exhibition at the Jeu de Paume brings together, and for the first time in France, a large selection of her work from the past ten years.

The exhibition features The Seaman (2012), the narrative of a Filipino sailor reflecting on the mechanisms of globalised trade from his perspective as a worker in perpetual exile; The Mapping Journey Project (2008-2011) and The Constellations Series (2011), an alternative map of eight forced journeys throughout the Mediterranean; as well as the Speeches series (2012-2013), a trilogy of videos (Mother Tongue, Words on Streets and Living Labour), which focus on different ways of belonging, namely, a linguistic community, citizenship and identification with the working class.

Foreign Office combines a digital film, a series of photographs and a silk-screen print. In this body of works, Khalili focuses on the period between 1962 and 1972 when Algiers hosted liberation movements from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the USA, as well as European anti-fascist organisations. It is a mixed-media project that aims at suggesting a meditation on the transmission of the history of utopias as poetic practice, based on language and film montage.

Produced in Miami and its area in 2012, “Wet Feet” is a photo series examining the metonymic traces left by individuals forced to travel illegally from the Caribbean, and who eventually reached US soil.

Premiered at documenta 14, The Tempest Society was a milestone in the artist’s work, illuminating her long-term reflection on radical equality and art as a civic platform. Twenty-Two Hours, a new work in film will have its French premiere at the Jeu de Paume. It investigates Jean Genet’s commitment to the Black Panther Party, and reflects on the essential connection between poetry, collective emancipation and allyship.

Curators: Bouchra Khalili, Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes and Marta Gili.

Exhibition produced by the Jeu de Paume and the CAAC – Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla.

To have more information about the show and to get press images, please contact presse [​at​] jeudepaume.org.