Making the ghosts appear – Interview with Bouchra Khalili

 

Since the mid-2000's, Bouchra Khalili has been producing astute, demanding 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 official versions of history in order to restore to our approach to the real and its protagonists a sense of depth of what is just. In her first large-scale project in Paris since her exhibition Blackboard at Jeu de Paume in 2018, three theatres will be hosting the work of Bouchra Khalili, in the form of video installations, 16mm films and textile-based pieces. Central to them are questions of representation, the public sphere and the words used there, montage and the collective.

 

 

Your works are the result of in-depth research, as well as extensive writing and encounters. How do you see your practice as an artist? Is it that of a researcher, spokeswoman, archivist, or an "editor"? Or is it something completely different?

Bouchra Khalili : I don't see myself as a researcher, or archivist, and certainly not as a spokeswoman. If my work is slow in the making, it is above all because I came into the art world with several pre-existing projects, in the form of ideas I already had, carried along by stories that I was familiar with, namely those that featured in my project for this year's Festival d’Automne. More specifically, taking my time has also allowed me to "do my homework", though I wouldn't call it research as this implies a rigorous approach in terms of methodology. At best, it could be said that I have a method, but it is one that consists more of a question that I ask myself as opposed to a set of tools. How can we follow in the remains of what has been wiped out? And, in doing so, how can we make visible different presences by showing their absence? This is why I'm only interested in what has not been archived, the untold. Although I understand its importance in terms of research, archive material holds little interest for me as an artist. The haunting power of absence is what guides me and gives direction to my research. As for being a spokesperson, it's the exact opposite of what I set out to do. 
I don't utter words of my own. 
At best, what I try to do is to create the necessary conditions and means in order to allow the spoken word of those directly concerned to be heard. As for being an "editor", yes, perhaps. For me, my gesture as an artist revolves around making a piece of work either in video or 16mm format, a process which has been put in place long before the editing stage. 
In reality, it starts right from the preparatory phase. 
Everything has been thought out in anticipation of that moment when all of these scattered fragments begin to dialogue with each other, and from out of which an account or story can emerge.

 

Remains, constellations, interweaving and editing or "montage" lie at the heart of your artistic vocabulary. What meaning does the articulation of the different elements take on for you?

It's the way I spontaneously think and reflect, and in doing so, how I create stories, images and sounds. I establish links between things that, at first sight, seem unrelated. Put differently, I see one thing, and then another, and then I see a link. After this, I follow the link and see what happens: what is the story that is starting to be told? This is how the figure gradually builds up. It's also what editing is, in that it sets up links between fragments. These fragments are not isolated. They interact with each other, and this is where the narration takes shape.

 

Astérismes (Fig. 1 à 3)  unfurls over three moments in time, both in terms of its presentation — each part is presented in a different theatre — and its subject matter — the activities of the Al Assifa theatre troupe are central to the various works. What does theatre represent for you? 

Theatre and photography were my gateway into the world of artistic creation. I started taking photographs and developing them at the age of 16 years old. Like many people, I had a fascination for darkrooms and the magic moment when the negatives go into the enlarger and ghost-like figures start to appear. I was also a performance artist for a young director, but it was more his choice than mine. The act of performing wasn't what I enjoyed most out of the whole experience. What I enjoyed most was working together as a collective, everything that went on "off-stage", namely the preparation, and directing. Paradoxically, everything I think I know about theatre comes from watching films which refused mere "filmed theatre" and which were inspired by the theatrical avant-garde. By this, I mean, for example, the films of Glauber Rocha, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the great Japanese classic artists – Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi – and the influence of the immense tradition of Japanese classical theatre, as well Ahmed Bouanani in Morocco, who probed deep into the performance of the storyteller in search of images. So I would say that theatre, and in particular, "what it can do" to moving images if of particular interest to me.

 

The third part of the project presents two video installations made in Morocco in 2024-2025 (The Public Storyteller ; The Public Writer). Though they are linked to your research on the Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes 1, they nonetheless appear to be the start of new areas of reflection. 

 

These are actually very old projects, to the extent that their titles were already present in preceding works. Moreover, my first ever personal exhibition in France in 2008 was called Storytellers. The last part of Foreign Office (2015) revolves around the figure of the public writer, and it's also the title in English of a series of silk screen prints made in 2019, part of The Magic Lantern (2019-2022) project. I've had a deep interest in the figure of the public writer for a long time. And even more so in that it was also an activity of mine, on a volunteer basis, during several years in Paris, for my North-African neighbours who could neither speak nor write French.
      I also try to understand why, in the wake of the various Independences, numerous North-African writers mysteriously defined themselves as "public writers", namely Kateb Yacine and Abdelkébir Khatibi. In Morocco, public writers still exist, but for how much longer? This once again brings me back to the roots of this strange poetry, which turns these anonymous figures into the scribes of our collective memories.

 

Interview conducted by Clément Dirié, April 2025 

 

1 The Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes, founded by North-African workers, was particularly involved in the fight against racism and the struggle for the rights of immigrant workers between 1973 and 1978. The Al Assifa and Al Halaka theatre troupes, composed of MTA members, are its theatrical emanations. In 2019, Bouchra Khalili published The Tempest Society (Book Works) which looks back on the theatrical experiences of Al Assifa, whose work The Tempest Society (2017) recounts, in part, its beginnings.