The Mapping Journey Project

source: sharjahartorg

The Mapping Journey Project is a mixed-media installation that combines eight video works and a printed map. It proposes to draw an alternative map of the Mediterranean area, spanning from Marseille to Ramallah, Ramallah to Bari, Bari to Rome, Rome to Barcelona and Barcelona to Istanbul, based on eight clandestine journeys. It challenges the normativity of cartography, to reveal underground and hidden geographies. Inspired by philosopher Michel Foucault’s The Life of Infamous Men, the artist collected an anthology of existences, of “singular lives…which have become, through I know not what accidents, strange poems.”
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source: observer

In the middle of a lofty gallery in the New Museum, four movie screens floated, suspended from the ceiling by wires. Projected onto one of them was a map of the Eastern Hemisphere. A hand clenching a black marker hovered, drawing a pattern of mysterious lines from Russia to Bangladesh to Africa. The hand pointed to Macedonia and, in a resigned drawl, a man began to speak in Italian. Subtitles flashed on the screen: “I was in prison there for 8 months and 20 days. Something like that.” This man is one of eight illegal immigrants who talked about their turbulent escapes to Europe with the artist Bouchra Khalili for her video series “The Mapping Journey Project” (2008-2011). The eight videos are currently on view at “Here and Elsewhere,” a show featuring over 45 contemporary Arab artists that will fill all five exhibition floors of the New Museum until September 28. The films all show a similar scene. Each one opens to an image of a map and soon a hand with a marker appears. You never see their faces – just a hand, with the occasional hint of a shirt or a shadow of lips moving. In just a few minutes, each person traced and narrated their roundabout journeys. Sometimes, lines were retraced while a person described being sent back home by border officers. At other times, the pen would rest on one spot for a while, making a thick pool of ink as a person described having to wait there for months for another boat to come. Some spoke in Italian, others in varieties of Arabic, and some in English. No matter the language, they all spoke in the same detached, matter-of-fact tone as they told horror stories of travel companions dying or moving through miles of desert on foot. Their trips took anywhere from a few months to five years. Ms. Khalili, 39, was born in Casablanca and is one of the few artists in “Here and Elsewhere” to have shown in the United States before this exhibition. Though she also works with photography and prints, most of her pieces in the past few years have been videos—many of which experiment with different ways of narrating the journeys of illegal immigrants. In her 2008 video, Anya, for example, Ms. Khalili showed in real-time the boat trip that a young Iraqi woman took from Asia to Europe across the Bosphorus straight, while the girl’s voiceover recounted 12 years of living undocumented in Istanbul. Ms. Khalili says she does not see these people as migrants, but as members of a political minority, whose journeys are acts of defiance. “Ultimately this is what ‘The Mapping Journey Project’ is about,” she said in an email. “How a human being is still able to resist though he/she is trapped in the nets of arbitrary power.” To find subjects for “The Mapping Journey Project,” Ms. Khalili traveled to European cities known for being transitory points for migrants. She never went in search of someone from a specific country. Rather, she started the process by becoming immersed in her location. Then, like clockwork, the people she was looking for would emerge. “The encounter occurs from the moment I accept to get lost in a city,” she said. “It’s a mysterious process, even though it relies on a method.” Still of Mapping Journey #7, from “The Mapping Journey Project.” (Courtesy Bouchra Khalili and Galerie Polaris, Paris) Ms. Khalili would then spend hours talking to the person off-camera—asking them questions about their travels and allowing them to flesh out their narrative. “Those conversations participate in a process of empowerment,” explained Ms. Khalili. “The narrators become the authors of their own narratives.” When they had developed their voice, she would give them the map and the marker and film their narrative in one shot. She’s quick to clarify that the videos are not interviews. She does not interrupt with questions and she does not edit after shooting the films. Perhaps that is what makes her work so powerful. The narratives are not scripted. The camera does not have a filter. The work feels as raw and real as it is. Ms. Khalili deftly brings these stories out of her subjects, but ultimately the stories and voices do not belong to her. And so, she has respectfully and tastefully imposed as little of her voice on them as possible. For some, the journey is not over. In one of the pieces, a woman traced her journey from Mogadishu, Somalia to Bari, Italy with a blue marker. Unlike most others, she made an arrow at each place she stopped. Her final arrow rested on Bari and pointed hopefully north. She explained that she wants to go to Norway or England. “Now I live and work here and I’ve learned Italian,” she said as she traced and retraced the dark blue arrow. “But staying here I don’t like.”
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source: yishushijie

四楼的中心作品是现居柏林的摩洛哥艺术家布彻拉·卡里里（Bouchra Khalili）在 2008 年到 2011 年间创作的《地图旅行项目》（The Mapping Journey Project），四个双面大屏幕循环播放着录像。由于多种原因，每年进入欧洲的非法移民多达百万。卡里里在每个中转城市寻找记录对象，让他们在地图上标记出从家乡到该城市的旅程，并叙述自己的迁徙过程。从索马里到巴里（意大利港口城市），从孟加拉国到罗马，从拉姆安拉到耶路撒冷，每个人背井离乡的原因都不相同：逃离战争、避免种族歧视、摆脱贫穷，或者简单到只为追寻爱人的脚步，但在对抗政治冲突、追求个人自由的大方向上却殊途同归。
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source: galerieofmarseille

Bouchra Khalili is a French-Moroccan video-artist, born in 1975 in Casablanca.

Bouchra Khalili has devoted herself to video work, both in single channel and installation form, since 2002. The artist uses this medium for its impurity, which allows her to place her work at the very limits of cinema and the fine arts, documentary and experimental work, blurring the lines between these two practices. Her videos explore the Mediterranean area seen as a territory dedicated to a wandering, nomadic existence. She documents the places she passes through, their images and the images they generate. Khalili produces representations of these spaces’ mental dimension by placing them in an unusual perceptive experience, thus testifying to the contemporary reality of emigration and its stories.

For the Storytellers exhibit at the galerieofmarseille, Bouchra Khalili will present works produced in 2007 and 2008 between Paris, New York, Marseille and Istanbul. By combining physical and imaginary geography, Khalili aims to draw an alternative map of contemporary migratory trajectories. Purposefully mixing up topographic identifiers that might reveal the location of the areas she explores, Khalili’s undertakes an intensive practice of rearrangements, as much geographic as artistic and conceptual.

With Mapping Journey (videos and photographs, 2008), Khalili compares the lived experience of emigration with the flatness of geographic maps. Entrer dans l’Histoire (“Enter into History”, silkscreen on adhesive, 2008), which recalls the Arab calligram tradition, reveals an alternative map of Africa: one that describes the misunderstandings that weigh upon a continent that “has not fully entered history”.

Circle Line (video installation) suggests a possible nomenclature for immigration to the United States. On two screens, sentences excerpted from a questionnaire for green card applicants and fragments from a conversation with an illegal immigrant answer one another, while the soundtrack of a naturalization ceremony is played back on a third screen. Simultaneously, images of the city unfold one after another in hypnotic traveling shots.

This complex relationship between documentary and ghostly images, in different languages, of “in” and “off” sounds, of real or potential stories, is typical of Bouchra Khalili’s videos, most notably in the triptych Des Histoires Vraies – Straight Stories (video, 2006 (first part) and 2008 (second and third parts)). While the first part takes place between the south of Spain and the North of Morocco, the second part presented in the exhibition explores Istanbul, and more specifically, the Bosphore area. Like the Straight of Gibraltar, the Straight of Bosphore is simultaneously a physical border that separates two continents (Europe and Asia) and an imaginary one. But since the 1990’s, this intermediary zone has mostly become a labyrinth where migrants in transit wait before going further west. For most, the place that was intended as a temporary stop becomes permanent. Through the constant movement of spatial, visual and auditory disconnections, Straight Stories- Part 2 (3 single-channel videos, 2008) unveils a mental expedition that takes us to meet the people that haunt these places, and who confide their hopes to go or stay, to return home or continue their travels.

Bouchra Khalili est une artiste Franco-Marocaine, née à Casablanca, en 1975.
Élevée entre la France et le Maroc, elle vit et travaille à Paris.
Elle a étudié le cinéma à la Sorbonne Nouvelle, et est diplômée de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de
Paris-Cergy.

Le travail de Bouchra Khalili, essentiellement en vidéo (monobande et installation), explore l’espace méditerranéen envisagé comme un territoire dédié au nomadisme et à l’errance. L’artiste utilise la vidéo en raison de l’impureté du médium, qui lui permet de situer son travail aux limites du cinéma et des arts plastiques, du documentaire et de l’essai, rendant mouvantes les frontières entre ces pratiques.

Dans ses vidéos, Bouchra Khalili documente les territoires qu’elle explore, l’imaginaire de ces territoires, et plus encore l’imaginaire que ces territoires génèrent. Khalili produit ainsi des représentations de la dimension mentale de ces espaces, en les déplaçant vers une expérience perceptive singulière, qui n’a pas valeur d’exemple, mais qui témoigne pourtant de la réalité contemporaine de l’émigration et de ses récits. Ainsi dans Vue Panoramique (2005), The Round Trip (2005-2006), et Des Histoires Vraies – Straight Stories (2006), elle s’attache volontairement à brouiller les repères topographiques des espaces frontaliers traversés, pour en révéler la dimension mentale et imaginaire : un lieu labyrinthique, soumis à une déambulation circulaire et permanente.

Khalili procède ainsi par mouvements constants de déconnexions spatiales, visuelles, et sonores. Ses vidéos sont construites selon des mises en relations complexes d’images documentaires et néanmoins fantomatiques, de langues différentes, de sons « in » et « off », de récits réels ou potentiels mais toujours fragmentaires. Dans Vue Aérienne (2006), elle observe une grande ville occidentale soumise à une double présence spectrale : des films publicitaires qui contaminent l’espace urbain vu selon un angle impossible (littéralement par le haut), et des voix non identifiées qui le hantent. En produisant une confusion sur le statut des images, le nom et la localisation de cette ville, et l’identité de ceux qui la hantent, Khalili déploie une véritable expédition mentale qui tresse et “détresse” les signes hétérogènes qui traversent ce lieu, pour dévoiler une forme de confusion moderne qui contamine la ville et sa perception.

En ce sens, elle cultive une forme d’ambiguïté, mais c’est précisément cela qui permet à l’artiste d’élaborer des récits d’expériences perceptives sensibles et tangibles, liées aux trajets migratoires, et aux états actuels des espaces frontaliers et urbains. En définitive, ce qui caractérise le mieux son travail c’est une pratique intensive et singulière du déplacement : plastique, conceptuel, géographique.

Bouchra Khalili est née en 1975 à Casablanca, et a grandi à Paris, où elle vit et travaille. Elle a étudié le cinéma à La Sorbonne Nouvelle, et est diplômée de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy.
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source: bouchrakhalili

Bouchra Khalili (born 1975 in Casablanca) is a Moroccan-French visual artist.
Raised between Morocco and France, she studied Film at Sorbonne Nouvelle and Fine Arts at École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy.
Working with film, video, installation, photography, and prints, Khalili’s practice articulates language, subjectivity, orality, and geographical explorations. Each of her projects can be seen as a platform offered to members of political minorities to elaborate, narrate, and share strategies and discourses of resistance.
Khalili’s work has been internationally exhibited such as at “Foreign Office”, solo show at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015); “Garden Conversation”, solo show at MACBA, Barcelona (2015); “Here & Elsewhere”, New Museum, New York (2014); “The Opposite of the Voice-Over”, solo show at Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto (2013); “The Encyclopedic Palace”, 55th Venice Biennale (2013); “Living Labour”, solo project at PAMM, Miami (2013); “La Triennale”, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012); and 10th Sharjah Biennial (2011); among others.
She was the recipient of “Abraaj Group Art Prize”, (2014)”; “Sam Art Prize 2013″, Sam Art Projects, Paris; “DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program” (2012); “Vera List Center for Arts and Politics Fellowship” (The New School, New York, 2011-2013); “Villa Médicis Hors-les Murs” (2010); “Videobrasil Residency Award” (2009); “Image-Mouvement Grant” (French National Centre for the Arts, 2008); “Louis Lumière Documentary Award” (Film Office, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, France, 2005).
Bouchra Khalili lives and works in Berlin.
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source: bouchrakhalili

Bouchra Khalili (née en 1975 à Casablanca), est une artiste franco-marocaine.
Élevée entre la France et le Maroc, elle a étudié le cinéma à la Sorbonne Nouvelle et est diplômée de l’École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy.
Son travail en film, vidéo, installation, photographie et sérigraphie, articule langage, oralité, subjectivité et explorations géographiques. Chacun de ses projets peut s’envisager comme une plateforme depuis laquelle des membres de minorités peuvent articuler, proposer, mettre en oeuvre et partager, stratégies et discours de résistances élaborés depuis les marges.
Bouchra Khalili a participé à de nombreuses expositions, telles que récemment: “Foreign Office”, exposition personnelle, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015); “Garden Conversation”, exposition personnelle, MACBA, Barcelone (2015); “Here & Elsewhere”, New Museum, New York (2014); “The Opposite of the Voice-Over”, exposition personnelle, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto (2013); “The Encyclopedic Palace”, Exposition Internationale de la 55ème Biennale de Venise (2013); “Living Labour”, exposition personnelle PAMM, Miami (2013); “La Triennale”, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); 18ème Biennale de Sydney (2012); et la 10ème Biennale de Sharjah (2011); parmi d’autres.
Elle a reçu plusieurs prix et distinctions, dont : “Abraaj Group Art Prize”, (2014)”; “Prix Sam pour l’Art Contemporain”, 2013, Sam Art Projects, Paris; “DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program” (2012); “Vera List Center for Arts and Politics Fellowship” (The New School, New York, 2011-2013); “Villa Médicis Hors-les Murs” (2010); “Videobrasil Residency Award” (2009); “Image-Mouvement” (CNAP, Paris, 2008); “Prix Louis Lumière” (Bureau du Film Documentaire, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, France, 2005).
Bouchra Khalili vit et travaille à Berlin.