Following its acclaimed showing at MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, organised in partnership with Sharjah Art Foundation, Between Circles and Constellations opens in Sharjah this September.
The major exhibition of works by Bouchra Khalili attests to the artist’s committed enquiry into the hidden histories of solidarities among transnational and stateless communities through a selection of significant projects over the last 15 years. Neither fiction nor documentary, her work interweaves varied visual and sonic materials, formulating hypotheses for new emancipatory forms of belonging.
Spanning film, photography, print, installation, publications and textile, the Morocco-born artist’s work centres around collaborations with members of communities rendered invisible by the nation-state. Her collaborators act as ‘civic poets’ who merge the personal and collective, and, together with the artist, develop alternative ways of witnessing history. Employing montage as a tool for articulation and speculation, Khalili’s narrative style invites her audience also to become active collaborators and eventually join the cohort of civic poets populating her works.
The two key words in the exhibition’s title—circles and constellations—echo the potential communities envisaged in Khalili’s works. ‘Circles’ refers to al halqa, a traditional Moroccan form of storytelling in which people across generations gather in a circle and exchange memories and political ideals. While this type of civic gathering has been present in the artist’s practice from the beginning, it is highlighted in her recent works revolving around the theatre groups founded by North African migrant workers in 1970s France as well as her new two-channel installation The Public Storyteller (2024), which was shot in Marrakesh.‘Constellations’, on the other hand, arise in the network of transnational solidarities that the exhibition reveals by connecting different migrant and anti-colonial groups and their struggles across seas and continents.
The two-channel film installation The Public Storyteller (2024) foregrounds oral transmission as an act of resistance while linking past political strategies to the present day and future. The film concludes Khalili’s series of works initiated in 2017 around the Movement of Arab Workers, its theatre groups Al Assifa [The Tempest] and Al Halaka [The Circle], and the presidential campaign of the 18-year-old Al Assifa member who ran in the 1974 French election under the pseudonym ‘Djellali Kamal’. Fifty years after Kamal’s campaign, Khalili films this story, narrated in Marrakesh to young Moroccans in the tradition of al halqa. Through al halqa and the layout of the installation, the circle becomes a continuing metaphor for the movements of time and history and a motif highlighting the ritualistic dimensions of spectatorship.
Sea-Drifts (2024), an embroidered tapestry piece, continues Khalili’s long-term research into migration routes, building on her extensive work The Mapping Journey Project (2008–2011), which traces the convoluted journeys of eight anonymous individuals, among others, in search of a better life. This new work tracks eight specific migratory journeys linking the North and West African coasts to the Canary Islands. These irregular routes, first developed in the early 2000s, are considered among the deadliest migratory paths due to the dangers of sailing across the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. Khalili isolates these arduous passages and renders them on fabric dyed with natural indigo. Referencing the colonial history of this organic compound, the artist connects these modern migration trajectories with indigo trade routes from the sixteenth century. Subverting the traditional function of map-making, which historically served as a tool to assert power, Khalili redefines it as a means to bear witness to the experiences of stateless individuals and those compelled to undertake illegal travel.
The Constellation Series (2011) is the concluding chapter in Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project. Using silkscreen, the artist transposes each journey across the Mediterranean onto a blue backdrop, whose shade lies between the sea and the night sky. In the absence of borders and other barriers, each pathway appears like a celestial constellation. Throughout history, constellations have served as visual manifestations of folklore and mythology as well as navigation tools in spaces where landmarks did not exist. In The Constellations Series, Khalili lets these singular paths give rise to a collective narrative, offering a new perspective on our shared world.
Bringing these works together, the exhibition bears witness to what the artist calls ‘radical citizenship’, an unconditional conception of community freed from normative notions of identity.
Between Circles and Constellations is organised by Sharjah Art Foundation and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. The exhibition is curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, Director and President of Sharjah Art Foundation, with Amal Al Ali and Meera Madhu, Curatorial Assistants at Sharjah Art Foundation.
7 September–1 December 2024, Galleries 4, 5, 6, Bait Habib Yousef and Mirage City Cinema
Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah
9:00 am–9:00 pm, Saturday to Thursday | 4:00 pm–9:00 pm, Friday
Free admission. Advance registration is required at sharjahart.org.
Alongside the exhibition, the screening of The Tempest Society takes place at Mirage City Cinema every Saturday evening. Visit sharjahart.org for weekly timings.
Bouchra Khalili is a Vienna-based Moroccan-French visual artist who works itinerantly. Encompassing film, video, installation, photography, printmaking and textile alongside discursive and editorial platforms, Khalili’s multidisciplinary practice develops collaborative strategies of storytelling with members of communities excluded from citizenship. Combining oral traditions with visual and sonic forms informed by post-independence avant-gardes and conceptual practices, Khalili formulates hypotheses for new emancipatory forms of belonging.
Khalili’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions such as MACBA, Barcelona (2023); Luma Foundation, Arles (2023); Bildmuseet Umeå(2021); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2019); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016). She has also participated in the Venice Biennale (2013, 2024), Sharjah Biennial (2011, 2023) and documenta 14, Athens/Kassel (2017), among others. She was a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute (2017), Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination (2019) and The Vera List Center at The New School, New York (2011–2013). Khalili is a founding member of La Cinémathèque de Tanger, an artist-run non-profit organisation in Morocco.
Sharjah Art Foundation is an advocate, catalyst and producer of contemporary art within the Emirate of Sharjah and the surrounding region, in dialogue with the international arts community. The Foundation advances an experimental and wide-ranging programmatic model that supports the production and presentation of contemporary art, preserves and celebrates the distinct culture of the region and encourages a shared understanding of the transformational role of art. The Foundation’s core initiatives include the long-running Sharjah Biennial, featuring contemporary artists from around the world; the annual March Meeting, a convening of international arts professionals and artists; grants and residencies for artists, curators and cultural producers; ambitious and experimental commissions and a range of travelling exhibitions and scholarly publications.
MACBA is a public institution dedicated to contemporary art, and a living museum, permeable to its social and cultural contexts, which believes in art and culture as constitutive of the commons. Since it opened its doors in 1995, it has established itself as a platform for innovative museological praxis, consolidating its position as a space for the formulation of collective consciousness, professional rigour, and public debate, guided by a understanding of its institutional role and its commitment to critical thinking and social transformation.
As a contemporary art institution, MACBA encourages the production of knowledge at the intersection of art —in all possible meanings of the term—, social sciences, and political intervention and, it takes on the responsibility to care for and disseminate an international art collection with focus on the cultural production of Catalonia, providing encounters for the experience of art as a space of hospitality and collective learning.
MACBA is a situated museum, part of the vital cultural and artistic milieu of the city of Barcelona, and the neighborhood of Raval where it is located. Positioned in and from this hyperlocality, the museum relates to the diverse and creative communities. As an international museum, MACBA supports contemporary art practices in Catalonia’s multilayered and vibrant landscape and beyond, open to the world.
Sharjah is the third largest of the seven United Arab Emirates, and the only one bridging the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Reflecting the deep commitment to the arts, architectural preservation and cultural education embraced by its ruler, Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohammad Al Qasimi, Sharjah is home to more than 20 museums and has long been known as the cultural hub of the United Arab Emirates. It was named UNESCO's Arab Capital of Culture in 1998 and the UNESCO World Book Capital in 2019.
Alyazeyah Al Marri
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Bouchra Khalili, The Public Storyteller (still), 2024. Commissioned and co-produced by Kunstenfestivaldesarts and Sharjah Art Foundation, co-commissioned by Festival d’Automne à Paris. Courtesy of the artist and mor charpentier, Paris © Bouchra Khalili
