Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The artistic career of Bouchra Khalili extends beyond the realm of video making. Born in Casablanca (1975, Morocco), the artist lives in Paris, where she studied cinema at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle, the same school in which she has been teaching aesthetics and history of cinema since 2000. Khalili also holds a degree in arts from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts Paris-Cergy, and is coprogrammer at the Tangier Cinematheque (Morocco). Established in 2006, the Cinematheque has the mission of shedding light on Moroccan film culture, becoming a hub for international exchange and a training center for cinema professionals and students.

Cinema is the main reference for Khalili, who produced her first works - InSide/OutSide, L'Antichambre, À rebours, and Appuntamento - from 2000 to 2002, the same period in which she held a residency at the Cité des Arts, in Paris. From 2003 onwards, Khalili's videos and installations started attracting attention in audiovisual festivals and exhibitions around the world, garnering awards and becoming part of important collections, such as those of the OVNI (CCCB) and of the CaixaForum Mediateca, in Barcelona, and that of The Film Society of Lincoln Center, in New York.

Aspects of Mediterranean culture provide an imaginary territory for Bouchra Khalili's works. Their strong experimental character problematizes traditional audiovisual formats, absorbing procedures from documentary films, fiction, and video art, and taking in productive contaminations from the visual arts field. Khalili's imagetic constructions reveal the experiences of displacement typical of contemporary nomadisms, with all their implications to the construction of identities-at the same time gliding smoothly between the preestablished territories that sometimes limit formats. 

The formal construction of Khalili's works features precise cuts, extended shots, and a near-absence of image treatment. Her inventiveness is apparent in the relation between sound and image and in her subjective-reflexive treatment of subject matters, using texts that are both poetic and elucidative of contemporary situations.

One example of Khalili's way of dealing with said situations is her answer to Tunisian curator, writer, and poet Abdelwahab Meddeb's invitation for her to participate in the exhibition West by East, held in 2005 at the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture. In the installation La Soltera/La Novia, a woman runs a selection process for candidates to having a liaison with her. By dealing with “the taboo of foreign love in the heart of a Muslim woman,” her work reinvents, in our days, the syndrome of Zoraida-an Arab woman who falls in love with a Christian man, in a story told by Cervantes in El hombre de la mancha.

That same way of tackling complex issues is present in works dealing with the subjects of territory and nomadisms, such as Napoli Centrale (2002), presented at the 14th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival, Vue Panoramique (2005), screened during the 15th edition of the Festival, and the recent Vue Aérienne (2006). In these three works, the issues of territory create a sort of landscape, characterized by a focus on subjective relationships, and in the territorialization/deterritorialization motions typical of our times. Through Khalili's images, we glimpse a subtle revelation of the situations and tensions that territory, borders, and the urban space provoke in our subjectivities.

Maybe this is why her new work, Straight Stories, still under development, shows precisely how people view each other near the Strait of Gibraltar, which separates Morocco from Spain. Again, Khalili's editing dissociates sound and image: voiceover statements are played as a backdrop to images of the landscape, the passages, the territory. This elaborate editing resource helps us viewers realize to what extent that narrow, specific space is capable of giving rise to such radically different and foreign views of the world and of the Other.