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Speeches-Chapter 1: Mother Tongue, From The Speeches Series (2012-2013), video trilogy. Digital Film, HD video, 4/3. 23'. 2012. Video still. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Polaris, Paris.
Exhibition
Bouchra Khalili – The Opposite of Voice-Over
2 Apr 2016 – 19 Jun 2016
Address
- Stiftelsen Färgfabriken
- Lövholmsbrinken 1
- Stockholm
Stockholm County - 117 42
- Sweden
Bouchra Khalili’s first solo exhibition in the Nordic region consists of works produced from 2008 to 2013.
About
The exhibition focuses on works that at their core situate voices of members of minorities, often unheard, and provides alternative conceptions of belonging and civic community.
The Mapping Journey Project (2008-2011) is an 8-channel video installation. By displaying maps, on which individuals obliged to cross borders illegally, literally draw their journeys while recounting them, this work provides alternative maps to normative cartography.
The Constellations Series (8 silkscreen prints, 2011) is the closing chapter of The Mapping Journey Project. Going back to printed maps, the series reproduces each of the drawings from the videos forming The Mapping Journey Project. By translating them into the form of constellations of stars, the series suggests a geography of resistance as experienced by “singular lives ... which have become, through I know not what accidents, strange poems” [Michel Foucault, The Lives of Infamous Men].
The film-trilogy The Speeches Series (2012-13) further emphasizes the critical function of speech and self-representation by operating as a platform that allows members of minorities based in Paris, Genoa, and New York respectively to address issues of language, citizenship, and class.
Trained in cinema and visual art while working in several mediums, Khalili often repurposes the visual approach of documentary cinema. The Opposite of Voice-Over however invites us to move beyond appearance as it acknowledges the presence of voices often disregarded or stigmatised by systems of media logic and the regulations of national representation. Through individual enunciations, many times with the accent of a political minority, a number of strategies and discourses of resistance are deliberated against arbitrary, societally and historically defined obstructions. Through her unique capacity to combine poetry beyond written language with subject matter and the power of the spoken word Khalili creates a temporary sense of community where there is none.
