PARIS.- The Jeu de Paume is presenting an extensive survey of work by the French-Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili (b. Casablanca, 1975). The artist’s films, video installations, photographs and silkscreen prints suggest civic platforms, from which members of minorities perform their strategies of resistance to arbitrary power.

Through her artworks, Bouchra Khalili articulates subjectivity and collective history, questioning the complex relationships between the singular and civic belonging, calling for a new collective voice to come into being. Her solo exhibition at the Jeu de Paume brings together, for the first time in France, a large selection of work from the past ten years.

The exhibition features The Seaman (2012), a first-person account by a Filipino sailor reflecting on the mechanisms of globalised trade from his perspective of a worker in perpetual exile; The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11) and The Constellations Series (2011), an alternative map of eight forced journeys throughout the Mediterranean; as well as The Speeches Series (2012–13), a trilogy of videos (Mother Tongue, Words on Streets and Living Labour) examining belonging from different perspectives: language, citizenship, and class.

Foreign Office combines a digital film, a series of photographs and a silkscreen print. In this body of works, Khalili focuses on the period between 1962 and 1972 when Algiers hosted liberation movements from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the USA, as well as European anti-fascist organisations. It is a mixed-media project that aims at suggesting a meditation on the transmission of the history of utopias as a poetic practice, based on language and film montage.

Produced in Miami and its area in 2012, Wet Feet is a photo series examining the metonymic traces left by individuals forced to travel illegally from the Caribbean, and who eventually reached US soil.

Premiered at documenta 14, The Tempest Society was a milestone in the artist’s work, illuminating her long-term reflection on radical equality and art as a civic platform.

Twenty-Two Hours, a new work in film, will have its French premiere at the Jeu de Paume. It investigates Jean Genet’s commitment to the Black Panther Party, and reflects on the essential connection between poetry, collective emancipation and allyship.

Raised between Paris and Casablanca, Bouchra Khalili is based in Berlin, and is a Professor of Contemporary Art at the Oslo National Art Academy. She studied film at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and visual arts at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts, Paris-Cergy. With artist Yto Barrada, she is co-founder of La Cinémathèque de Tanger, an artist run, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting film culture in North Africa, which opened in 2006.

Her work has been the focus of numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at the Secession, Vienna (2018), the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2017), MoMA, New York (2016), the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015), the MACBA, Barcelona (2015), the PAMM, Miami (2013–14), the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2013), and the DAAD Galerie, Berlin (2013).

Bouchra Khalili’s work has also featured in a number of international art events, including documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017), the Milan Triennale (2017), the 8th Göteborg Biennale (2015), the 55th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2013), La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012), the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) and Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011).

Bouchra Khalili is nominated this year for the Guggenheim Hugo Boss Prize and the Artes Mundi Prize. In 2017, she was the recipient of the Ibsen Award, the highest Norwegian distinction for the performing arts. She is currently a Visual Arts Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, and at the Harvard Film Study Center.

She has won the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2014) and the Sam Prize for Contemporary Art (2014), and has been a beneficiary of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm (2012), a Vera List Center for Arts and Politics Fellowship (The New School, New York, 2011–13), the Villa Médicis Hors les Murs (2010), a Videobrasil Residency Award (2009), an Image-Mouvement grant (CNAP, 2008) and the Louis Lumière award (2005).