A visual and text based investigation led by Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili during many years following the traces left by the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes, a group fighting for the rights of the Arab workers in France at the turn of the 1970s.
Khalili focused her attention on the theatre groups Al Assifa and Al Halaka who were created in this political environment. The publication unfolds from The Circle (2023), a video installation shown for the first time at the 15th Sharjah Biennale (2023), at Macba (2023) and at the Luma Foundation (in Arles in 2023-2024 and Zurich in 2025).
The book is published in conjunction with Bouchra Khalili's exhibitions as guest visual artist of the Festival d'Automne in Paris in 2025.
French-
Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili (born 1975 in Casablanca, lives and works in Paris) has devoted herself to
video work, both in single channel and installation form, since 2002. The artist uses this medium for its impurity, which allows her to place her work at the very limits of cinema and the fine arts, documentary and experimental work, blurring the lines between these two practices. Her videos explore the Mediterranean area seen as a territory dedicated to a
wandering, nomadic existence. She documents the places she passes through, their images and the images they generate. Khalili produces representations of these spaces' mental dimension by placing them in an unusual perceptive experience, thus testifying to the contemporary reality of emigration and its stories.
Bouchra Khalili is internationally recognized, and her work has been shown in many major exhibitions, including biennials in Sharjah (2011), Sydney (2012), Moscow and Venice (2013), the Paris Triennale (2012) and the latest documenta in Kassel (2017). She has also had solo shows notably at the MoMA in New York, the
Palais de Tokyo in Paris, at Harvard University in Cambridge (Mass.), at the MACBA in Barcelona, and at the Secession in Vienna. In 2018 and 2019 several international museums will be holding solo exhibitions of her work.
