BOUCHRA KHALILI – Circles and Storytellers

Discover the installation views of Bouchra Khalili’s exhibition « Circles and Storytellers » at Mosaic Room.

Circles and Storytellers is the first public UK solo exhibition by French-Moroccan artist and educator Bouchra Khalili. It presents interconnected works The Circle Project (2023) and The Public Storyteller (2024), marking the conclusion of Khalili’s decade-long exploration of the overlooked history of the Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes (MTA) and its theatre groups, Al Assifa and Al Halaka.

The Circle Project

The Circle Project is a mixed-media installation, comprising a two-channel video projection, 16mm short films transferred to video on monitors, and a wallpaper The project forms the second chapter of Khalili’s investigation on Al Assifa, an agit-prop theatre group formed in Paris in 1973, made of Maghrebi migrant workers, all members of the pioneering autonomous organization of Arab workers in France, the Movement of Arab Workers (MTA), founded in 1973. The first chapter of this investigation, a feature film installation titled The Tempest Society, filmed in Athens in 2016, was premiered in 2017 at documenta 14.

The Public Storyteller

In this double-screen video installation, a Marrakchi storyteller, surrounded by young people, recounts Djellali Kamal’s appearance in Paris and his candidacy in the 1974 presidential election. At a time when immigrant communities in France were forced into political neutrality on pain of expulsion, Djellali Kamal’s candidacy was conceived as a public performance denouncing the denial of migrant rights and proposing transnational citizenship. It was intended to be “the voice” of millions of undocumented workers excluded from the right to vote. The circle formed for the halqa becomes a metaphor for time and the movement of history, summoning within it the ghosts of the past. Could the storyteller be the ghost of Djellali Kamal? Or could it be the spectators of the halqa? Or is it the circle itself, the visual motif structuring this work, that has been invested by the spirit of the presidential candidate?