Bouchra Khalili: Between Circles and Constellations

“So, how do we start? Do we start with the story? With the image of the story or, with what remains of them?” Asks a female voice we encounter in the first minutes of Twenty-Two Hours (2018), the film in which Bouchra Khalili explores a consistent query about what it means to be a witness, who has conceded such a role or has claimed to perform it. Processes of writing history, particularly when involving untold, unarchived or invisibilized narratives, depend primarily on acts of witnessing, acts aiming to render oneself and one’s story visible. Who is a witness? Who can claim that agency? This daunting inquiry has come to define Bouchra Khalili’s interdisciplinary practice, in which language and speech, foundational to oral traditions and storytelling, become crucial tools to the production of history in its postcolonial formulation.

The transmission of communal practices, the sonority of the words—shared, interpreted and listened—and the sentiments and the claims they manifested, have a sustained implication in the constitution of the public space, but also in the inclusion of individual and collective subjectivities in the public sphere. Al-Halqa, literally the circle or assembly, constitutes a centuries-old gathering around a public storyteller, in which the ritual and the sociopolitical merge. A poignant metaphor of Khalili’s practice, namely, a performative experience combining multi-layered narratives and genres, delivered in several languages and dialects, passing on the memory from community to community, from the collective to the individual, representing past and present at once, The Circle (2023), a newly commissioned work for this exhibition, brings together the artist’s work for a sense of completion.

Between Circles and Constellations brings together projects from the last decade of Khalili’s oeuvre, including film, video, installation, photography, objects, and prints. Bookended by The Tempest Society (2017) and The Circle (2023), two works that take inspiration from the legacy of the Movement of Arab Workers and their theatre groups in France in the 1970s, the exhibition itself is conceived as a constellation in which works are interconnected through their shared reflections on belonging, as well as through key historic figures who reappear throughout the artist’s works as haunting ghosts.

Curators: Elvira Dyangani Ose and Hiuwai Chu

Publication
A publication will be produced to accompany the exhibition which includes a selection of works and essays by Bouchra Khalili, Hoor Al Qasimi, Elvira Dyangani Ose, KJ Abudu, Övül Durmusoglu, Olivia C. Harrison, Youcef Rocé Kaminsky, and a conversation between the artist and Omar Berrada. The book has been designed by Pascal Sémur.

Exhibition coproduced with Sharjah Art Foundation.

The Circle (2023) coproduced by Sharjah Art Foundation, Luma Foundation, and MACBA Foundation.