PRESENTATION: Bouchra Khalili
Through video, photography and prints, Bouchra Khalili in her works, articulates subjectivity and collective history, questioning the complex relationships between the singular and civic belonging, calling for a new collective voice to come into being. Many of her videos, experiment with different ways of narrating the journeys of illegal immigrants. The artist does not see these people as migrants, but as members of a political minority, whose journeys are acts of defiance.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Louisiana Museum Archive
The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents a compelling exhibition featuring the work of Bouchra Khalili, a French-Moroccan artist known for her interdisciplinary approach that weaves together video, installation, printmaking, and oral history. Khalili’s practice is deeply rooted in collaboration, working closely with individuals and communities often marginalized or excluded from the privileges of legal citizenship. Through her poetic and politically engaged storytelling, Khalili explores new forms of collective identity and reimagines the possibilities of belonging. At the heart of the exhibition is “The Mapping Journey Project” (2008–2011), a large-scale, eight-channel video installation that marks a recent addition to the museum’s permanent collection. This presentation is the work’s Danish premiere, following its inclusion in the central exhibition Foreigners Everywhere at the 2024 Venice Biennale. In “The Mapping Journey Project”, Khalili strips the visual language down to its most essential components: a paper map of the world, a hand with a marker, and a disembodied voice. On-screen, the hand draws enigmatic, looping lines across continents and oceans—traces of real migration routes taken by individuals from the Middle East and Africa who have crossed borders clandestinely in search of safety and opportunity in Europe. Each voice narrates a personal story, told in the first person and in their own language, charting an often-perilous journey filled with uncertainty, waiting, loss, and endurance. In some instances, the pen lingers motionless, pooling ink over a single point on the map, a silent marker of prolonged stasis—months spent in limbo awaiting the next passage. To realize this work, Khalili immersed herself in the crossroads of migration—Marseille, Ramallah, Bari, Rome, Barcelona, and Istanbul—not actively seeking subjects, but allowing encounters to unfold organically. The testimonies are deeply human and unsentimental. The simplicity of the form belies the complexity of the stories: neither instructional nor emotional in a conventional sense, the work quietly subverts cartographic authority. The familiar topographies of political borders and oceanic expanses become abstracted as personal narratives inscribe new, counter-geographies of exile and resilience. Complementing the video installation is “The Constellations” series, a suite of eight silkscreen prints, each corresponding to a journey featured in “The Mapping Journey Project”. Against a stark, deep-blue background, Khalili redraws each route in shimmering white—void of geopolitical markers, stripped of state boundaries. In this decontextualized space, what once appeared as desperate, fragmented trajectories now resemble celestial paths or flight patterns—evoking a sense of grace, audacity, and defiant beauty. These works invite viewers to see beyond conventional narratives of migration, imagining instead a different kind of map—one driven by individual lives rather than state control. Reflecting on the series in Artforum (Summer 2016), Khalili cited Oscar Wilde: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at.” For her, these prints embody that utopian impulse—pointing toward a new cartography of freedom and solidarity. The exhibition also features a selection of Khalili’s other works, which further expand her inquiry into collective memory, decolonial histories, and alternative forms of civic imagination. Together, they offer a nuanced and urgent vision: one that challenges dominant paradigms of identity and borders, and instead gestures toward the possibility of communities formed through shared struggles, stories, and dreams.
Photo: Installation view, Bouchra Khalili, The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art- Humlebæk, 2025, Photo: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art / Camilla Stephan
Info: The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Gl Strandvej 13, Humlebæk, Denmark, Duration: 25/6-30/11/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-22:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://louisiana.dk/en/
