Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The Galerie Polaris, Paris, announced for the period from 8.9 to 27.10 the display of a large installation of Bouchra Kahlili, Moroccan artist who attended the 17th International Festival of Contemporary Art SESC_Videobrasil.

Speeches is a video-installation built around 5 single channel videos produced in 2012. Bouchra Khalili collaborated with five exiled people based in Paris and its outskirts, asking them to translate, memorize, and “re-tell” fragments of major texts from political thought and modern contemporary culture written by Malcom X, Abdelkrim El Khattabi, Édouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, and Mahmoud Darwish.

Each of the texts is said in the speaker’s mother tongue, including their unwritten dialects spanning from Moroccan Arabic to Dari from Afghanistan, Malinke from Mali to Kabyl from Algeria, and Wolof from Senegal. Each speakers tells these words in her/his familiar environment: at home or at work. Through this translation and its inherently oral nature, this process of “Créolisation” attempts a movement of re-incarnation through the languages of those in whom the words, the presence, and the thoughts remains mainly invisible.

Visit the gallery website.