Bouchra Khalili
Since the mid 2000s, Bouchra Khalili has been producing astute, challenging work in the form of visual and discursive hypotheses which take into account what is at stake, in contemporary terms, in art and the world at large. She uses film and video installation as her chosen media in order to communicate the spoken words of the unheard and breathe new life into long-forgotten stories. Her practice is taken up with undermining official geographies, narrations, and versions of history in order to restore depth and accuracy to reality and its protagonists. For her first major project in Paris since her exhibition Blackboard at Jeu de Paume (2018), three theaters are hosting her work in the form of video installations, 16mm films and textile-based pieces. Central to them are questions of representation, the public sphere, the process of montage, and the collective.
Born in 1975 in Casablanca, Khalili lives in Vienna (Austria) and works in an itinerant manner. Her research explores in particular the imperial and colonial continuities, embodied by contemporary forms of illegal migration and the memory of anti-colonial struggles. Influenced by the heritage of post-Independence avant-gardes and the vernacular traditions of Morocco, she develops storytelling strategies at the intersection of history and occult memories, questioning modalities of self-representation, the autonomy of individuals, and the forms of resistance of communities made invisible by the model of the nation-state. Graduated in Film and Media Studies from the Sorbonne Nouvelle and in Visual Arts from the Ecole Nationale des Arts de Paris-Cergy, Khalili has notably exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek and the Luma Westbau in Zurich in 2025; the Sharjah Art Foundation in Sharjah, the EMST Museum in Athens, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2024; the Luma Foundation in Arles and the MACBA in Barcelona in 2023; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2019; the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2018; the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2016; the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2015. She participated in the Venice Biennale in 2013 and 2024 and in documenta 14, Athens/Kassel, in 2017. She received the Sharjah Biennial Award in 2023 for The Circle and the Ibsen Prize in 2017 for The Tempest Society. She is a professor and Head of the department of Artistic Strategies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She is also a founding member of the Cinémathèque de Tanger.
“How can we trace what has been erased?”
Cet automne