ART-PREVIEW:Bouchra Khalili

Bouchra Khalili, The Constellations, Fig.3, 2011, Silkscreen print on paper, Mounted on aluminium & framed, 62 x 42 cm, Lisson Gallery ArchiveBouchra Khalili works with film, video, installation, photography and prints, in her work explores the broad topics of migration and displacement. In her 2008 video, “Anya”, for example, Bouchra Khalili showed in real-time the boat trip that a young Iraqi woman took from Asia to Europe across the Bosporus straight, while the girl’s voice over recounted 12 years of living undocumented in Istanbul.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lisson Gallery Archive

Bouchra Khalili in her solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in London presents three of her works, that bare the socially constructed nature of borders and challenges our fixed ideas of identity and nationhood. In the powerful 8-chanel video installation “The Mapping  Journey Project” (2008-11), the formal elements are pared to necessities: a paper map of the world, a hand holding a marker, drawing a pattern of mysterious lines on the map across oceans and borders, a voice of a man or a woman telling a first-person story of immigrating illegally from the Middle East or Africa to Europe in search of a better life. To find her subjects the artist traveled to the arteries of trafficking and trade (Marseilles, Ramallah, Bari, Rome, Barcelona and Istanbul). She didn’t go searching for her subjects but rather waited for an occasion to meet them. In just a few minutes, each person traces and narrates their journeys. At other times, the pen rests on one spot for a while, making a thick pool of ink as a person described having to wait there for months for another boat to come. No matter the language, they all tell horror stories of travel companions dying or moving through miles of desert on foot. Their trips took anywhere from a few months to five years. The work attempts to be neither sentimental nor didactic. While literal maps are the central visual element of “Mapping Journey Project”, they are employed only to be subverted. The blue water and the multi-colored countries become graphic abstractions as each protagonist draws lines across and through them. The abstract traces are realized further in Khalili’s “The Constellation Series” (2011). Composed of eight silkscreen prints, each them, translates the voyages recounted in the films into the form of star constellations similar to those that have been used in astronomy for centuries. Stripped of their borders and resisting containment, these journeys become fluid records of travels through space and time.  The last work in the exhibition, “Foreign Office” (2015), is made up of a film, a series of photographs and a print. Produced in Algeria, the project is part of the artist’s investigation over the last ten years into the forms and discourses of resistance as expressed by the members of minority groups that arise from these colonial and postcolonial histories. Bouchra Khalili revisits the period spanning from 1962 to 1972 when Algiers became the “capital of the revolutionaries” after Algeria’s independence. The city opened its arms to the many militants of African, Asian and American liberation movements such as the International Section of the Black Panther Party, the ANC (African National Congress), the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) and even the now-forgotten Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arab Gulf. Taking as a starting point this facet of Algerian history  whose piecemeal transmission, in the form of legend, has frozen it in the past, the film portrays two young Algerians of today who recount this history, questioning its traces and the reasons why it has been forgotten by their generation. Questions surrounding oral tradition, language and their relationship to the story and to history are at the film’s core and reveal an alternative historiography. The series of photographs establishes an inventory of the different places that welcomed these liberation movements based in Algiers, while a map made by the artist reinstates them within the city’s contemporary topography.

Info: Lisson Gallery, 67 Lisson Street, London, Duration: 27/1-18/3/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.lissongallery.com

Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey (Video Still), 2008-11, Installation of 8 single channel videos, Lisson Gallery Archive
Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey (Video Still), 2008-11, Lisson Gallery Archive

 

 

Bouchra Khalili, Foreign Office (Film Still), 2015, Lisson Gallery Archive
Bouchra Khalili, Foreign Office (Film Still), 2015, Lisson Gallery Archive

 

 

Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey (Video Still), 2008-11, Installation of 8 single channel videos, Lisson Gallery Archive
Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey (Video Still), 2008-11, Lisson Gallery Archive

 

 

Bouchra Khalili, Foreign Office (Film Still), 2015, Lisson Gallery Archive
Bouchra Khalili, Foreign Office (Film Still), 2015, Lisson Gallery Archive

 

 

Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey (Video Still), 2008-11, Installation of 8 single channel videos, Lisson Gallery Archive
Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey (Video Still), 2008-11, Lisson Gallery Archive