Bouchra 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 “film 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 and the failures of modern politics, Khalili’s films invite viewers to become the witnesses of our history and to contemplate our potential collective future.
The exhibition brings together three of Khalili’s seminal film works: The Tempest Society (2017), The Circle Project (2023)—a mixed-media installation that includes the video installation The Circle (2023), the mural poster A Timeline for a Constellation (2023), and the film installation The Storytellers (2023)—as well as The Public Storyteller (2024). This series of works conclude with the synchronized dual-channel installation The Public Storyteller, a poetic meditation on the power of storytelling. The work reconnects the narratives from The Tempest Society and The Circle to their original roots, highlighting the force of fabulation as a collective process.
This set of works departs from Khalili’s extensive research on the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes (MTA, Movement of Arab Workers) and its theater groups, Al Assifa (The Tempest in Arabic) and Al Halaka (The Circle in Arabic, which is also referencing the tradition of public storytelling that is common in North Africa). The MTA was a pioneering autonomous organization led by Maghrebi workers during the 1970s in France, advocating for equal rights. Theater was central to their activism, epitomizing their conception of solidarity and allyship, as it brought together Maghrebi workers and their French allies.
Set in Athens, The Tempest Society references the theatrical experiments of Al Assifa in order to examine their topicality in the context of the humanitarian, social, and economic crisis that marked the Greek capital in 2016. The Circle continues the same story, examining closely the birth of the MTA in 1973 both in Paris and in Marseille, its theater groups, and the candidacy of one of their undocumented members in the French presidential election in 1974. Further to these, The Storytellers (2023) suggests a contemplative space for history, where former members of Al Assifa and Al Halaka perform parts of their unarchived oral repertory fifty years after their first performance. The Public Storyteller (2024) shows the performance of a storyteller in Marrakesh narrating, 50 years later, the campaign of Djellali Kamel in the tradition of the “Halka” (the circle, the assembly), Morocco’s most ancient form of public storytelling. The act of storytelling and of listening becomes a ritual for summoning the specter of Djellali to appear, blending ancient oral traditions with the diaspora, eventually suggesting potential forms of transnational belonging.
Together, the works in the exhibition propose alternative forms of belonging, production of collectivizes with and through performance. They offer a meditative approach to witnessing suppressed histories, the power of collective fabulation as epitomized by the public storyteller, and “montage” as the art capable of resurrecting buried history.
at Luma Westbau, Zurich
until May 18, 2025