Boucha Khalili, born in Casablanca in 1975, is a Moroccan-French artist, who grew up in a country which, after achieving independence, sought its identity in a diversity of peoples, cultures and languages. From 1962 Algiers had been the center of the Pan-African Union providing a home for many resistance organizations. These early experiences shaped Khalili's political consciousness and formed her artistic sensitivity, as shown in such works as Foreign Office (2015), which in various ways illuminate the interconnectedness and influence of the Pan-African movement. While a video permits the leaders to speak and photographs of their residences provide space for themselves and their ideas, the representations of ground plans and localizations make an analytical perspective on the structure and network concealed behind these locations possible.
The Paris-trained artist, whose work The Mapping Journey Project (2008-2011) most recently reached a wide public at the Venice Biennale, works in a multimedia and transdisciplinary style. With a great love of detail, she combines performative and documentary strategies. Khalili places traditional storytelling, which she adopts from her Moroccan heritage, firmly at the center. By telling personal stories, she questions official, often one-sided historical representations and gives a new profile to the voices of people otherwise unheard. Her art is therefore both political and poetic, as it beautifully transcends the boundaries between documentary reality and artistic fiction.
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