Quarterly

Summer 2012 | ArteZine

Singular Lives, Strange Poems

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Working primarily with images and video, artist Bouchra Khalili creates installation pieces which take on issues of individual subjectivity in relation to a geographic context. Her work opens up narratives onto the flat topography of maps. Placed in the context of the gallery, the works invite the viewer to engage with these projected spaces through their own understanding of, and relation to place.

From 2008 to 2011, Khalili concentrated on a project entitled The Mapping Journey Project, elements of which were exhibited at the Sharjah Biennial 10 and Meeting Points 6. The project as a whole was comprised of eight video works as well as a series of silkscreen prints entitled The Constellations. For the sequence of videos in The Mapping Journey Project, Khalili travelled to Marseilles, Ramallah, Bari, Rome, Barcelona and Istanbul and sought out individuals to share their specific experiences of borders, land and space by tracing their journeys in ink onto the surface of maps. Translated into video works, each video presented the process of tracing these journeys paired with the voices of these individual describing the lived experience of moving between places. In contrast to these actively narrated pieces, The Constellations presents these same journeys in the stark simplicity of constellation-like traces on a blank blue plane, an ambiguous space between sky and land. Depicting only key cities and the paths taken in between, the works of The Constellations allow for the viewer to engage with these journeys without the context of physical landmarks or guiding narrative. The project, sixteen pieces in all, lays out the complexity of our contemporary borders and land divides and the impact of regulated movement.

For this issue of the ArteEast Quarterly, Body of Work, ArteEast curator Barrak Alzaid sat down for an interview with Bouchra Khalili to discuss the completion of The Mapping Journey Project. Their discussion centered on the role of they gallery space in shaping the installation, the viewer as a secondary editor and the project’s connection to the most recent iteration, The Constellations.

Bouchra Khalili (BK) and Barrak Alzaid (BA)

9 September 2011

Barrak Alzaid: I want to start talking about The Mapping Journey Project that was exhibited at the 10th Sharjah Biennial, which is comprised of eight videos. Could you tell me a little bit about the configuration of the installation and how it relates to the stories being told in each of the videos.

Bouchra Khalili: It is true that you can watch each video separately, because each of them tells a very peculiar narrative. But from the beginning of the project – which I started in 2008 and finalized in 2011 – I knew that I was working on an installation project. And that’s why I was very happy to finally have the opportunity to show for the first time the whole installation at the occasion of the 10th Sharjah Biennale.

Because working on the installation in the space also meant producing and generating connections between the videos, and specific interrelations that you cannot see if you watch the video on a single channel video projection. It is my “modus operandi”, even when installing different pieces that are not part of the same series of works. That’s why I consider that ultimately all my projects are installations. It is certainly related to my approach of exhibition spaces, that I see as a very specific kind of editing room, where new connections, new articulations can be produced. And at the same time, going back to “The Mapping Journey Project”, the space can also become a kind of virtual map that doesn’t exist but that is drawn through the articulation of each video.

BA: Can you explain how the space becomes an editing room – a dynamic player – within the installation? I wonder if you could also meditate on that subject with particular attention to the audience and to the ways in which the new connections and articulations can happen for them and the way they contribute to the production of the work. It’s not necessarily a fixed project that you’ve set out, because there’s an organic quality and an interaction between the viewer and the space.

BK: Actually, my work is not edited in the traditional cinematic meaning. Because to me the editing is more related to the articulation between the word, the image, the soundtrack, and the exhibition space, rather than traditional cutting. It is related to a conception of editing in which the interval – as Dziga Vertov defined it – is approached as the site of the image.

In my work, the site of this interval is first located in the interrelation between the image and the soundtrack, which is not a voice-over, but a dimension of the image, as well as between the work and the exhibition space. From there, the viewer’s point of view becomes fundamental, because viewers are invited to articulate what they see, what they hear, what they imagine, and what they picture. I then try to include as much as possible those interrelations in my work process, taking into consideration that an image is what is seen but it is also a surface for mental projection.

That’s why this process is also reflected in the hanging of the pieces within the exhibition space. In Sharjah, for example, I produced a sketch, but when I saw the space, I decided to reshape everything, because seeing the space allowed me to work on specific potential articulations that could emerge only from this peculiar site, by articulating different heights, different video-projections sizes, and the interval between each video, among others. The device was already shaped, but I could experiment it and intensify it using all the parameters, and working in the space as if I were literally “editing” the installation. From that point of view the French word “montage” for editing is probably more relevant, because it also refers to the conceptual meaning of this process.

BA: I definitely got that sense just being in the space, that you have as a viewer a very intimate relationship with whatever story you decide to watch first, and then it builds with each subsequent story that you hear. The weight, and the gravity, and the affect of meaning just becomes so charged, because the storytelling quality was so powerful and because the way that you enabled those stories to be told was so powerful too.

I wanted to jump a little bit and ask you about The Constellations, a series of 8 silkscreen prints that is the final chapter of The Mapping Journey Project, recently exhibited in Meeting Points 6. How do you see your work operating as an installation in Sharjah versus the renderings in Beirut? Could you describe that jump between the two presentations?

BK: I think this is related to the meaning of the project. As you said, the experiences shared in the videos are indeed very powerful, but I also see a very specific poetic dimension in these peculiar trajectories, in these “singular lives … which have become, through I know not what accidents, strange poems” to quote Michel Foucault. That’s also the reason why I really wanted to have on the label both in Sharjah and Beirut this quotation from “The Life of Infamous Men” by Foucault. Precisely because beneath the documentary aspect of the project, there’s also an imaginary and a poetic dimension that I could recognize in Foucault’s quotation when I had the chance to read his essay. And this is exactly what I wanted to approach in The Constellations. For The Constellations, I reproduced each of the drawings made by the participants in the Mapping Journey Project’s videos. I created a shift, a displacement, by translating these journeys to the form of constellations of stars inspired by the sky maps that have been in use in astronomy. I find it fascinating that sky maps and constellations have for centuries been the only tool for navigators and sailors to locate themselves in a space literally without landmarks, which is the sea. This also underscores the connection with the sky which does not have any landmarks either. By charting this displacement, I then tried to blur the limits between the sea and the sky, to eventually erase terrestrial boundaries. So, basically the idea was translating the drawings into constellations that are not imaginary projections and representations but real journeys, drawn by eight different people who were forced to cross borders illegally, which for most of them is the Mediterranean Sea.

BA: I think that your discussion of the poetics, of how to translate the poetics of the stories, the stories in the videos, and The Constellations is so beautiful. Even the kind of lyrical way that you describe it, I just feel so deeply arrested. I’m curious about the relationship between poetics and aesthetics, and poetics and narrative. Because with the installation work in Sharjah, there was such a strong discursive storytelling quality. There were these fixed shots on maps as they traced their journey, while “The Constellations” that you showed in Beirut were very startling, having a completely different storytelling quality. So I was wondering if you could talk about what kind of story you’re telling when the voice of the storyteller is not heard as in The Constellations.

BK: When I started exhibiting The Mapping Journey Project, a lot of people asked me ‘why don’t you show the original maps too’, which I kept. I kept all of them. But for me, the real map was in the articulation between the maps I used, the drawings, the voices, the gestures, the soundtrack and the narratives. At first glance, The Constellations seems very different, because it’s not dealing with narratives, but more directly with mapmaking, but a mapmaking that is not seen as a tool of a power, of control, but as a form of resistance. Through the drawing, through this deep blue and those white dots you can reconstitute the journey, you can see how a young Algerian man had to travel illegally from Algeria to Marseille, crossing the Mediterranean, then Italy, then France. Even, if, as you said, the voices are not heard, the journey is still there. But the thing that one can see when looking at The Constellations is that those journeys, even if they are very violent – and they are violent – are also a gesture of resistance. Because crossing illegally borders also means that you face violently borders, but at the same time, you also have to invent roads, you have to take roads that do not exist on maps, you are conducted to literally draw an invisible map, and ultimately to erase borders. And erasing borders, as well as erasing the limits between the sea and the sky are both a political and a poetical gesture. I don’t know if it’s very clear.

BA: I think it’s very clear.

BK: Let me give you an example: the blue I used for the silkscreen prints doesn’t exist.

BA: I was going to ask about that, it’s hard to tell, “is this the night sky, is it the sea?”

BK: That’s exactly what I wanted to suggest through this blue, and that is also related to this idea of erasing boundaries by erasing the limits between the blue, which is used to represent a night sky, and the one which is used to represent the sea. But the color issue was also very important for this specific reason: ‘How to produce an ambiguity between sea and sky?’ And mostly: ‘How to produce this ambiguity between the constellation as a tool for locating yourself in a space that has no landmarks, and a constellation that reflects a clandestine journey?’ Because for me, there was an obvious connection with people who are forced to travel illegally, that sometimes found themselves uncertain of where they were. For example, the young man that left Sudan arrived in Turkey and thought that he was in Italy which was supposed to be his final destination. Why? Because he spent four days literally lost in the middle of the Mediterranean. But he eventually found himself in Turkey, in Izmir. So it is also directly related to the experience of an illegal journey, the disorientation that it involves, and its relationship to spaces that have no landmarks, just as it is with the sea for example.

BA: I’m really interested in that sense of ambiguity that you’re describing. There’s this ambiguity within the journey itself. The sense of being lost and then locating oneself at a particular geographical point. There’s also a sense of ambiguity for the viewer in The Constellations. The viewer has a kind of path, a way into the work that feels, very much that you can locate yourself in relation to the work. Whereas, I get the sense that for the presentation in Beirut, there’s a kind of uncoupling of the viewer from the work. Can you talk about this ambiguous space that the viewer resides in? How does the viewer fit into that translation of the poetics and that ambiguity of sky, sea, and borders?

BK: Well, in some ways it’s not so different from my other works, because this project also requires an attentive viewer. At first, the viewer sees this blue, those small white dots, names of cities written on the blue and if the viewer takes a few minutes he starts to understand what this is about. But it requires time. It requires a viewer to be attentive, and it requires him to start to connect the piece as it is with a kind of imaginary process because you are also invited to reconstitute the journey in your own imagination. So it requires, I would say, an active viewer. And if the viewer is not involved in this process, I think that the piece can lose an important part of its meaning. So it’s not an easy piece in the end, because behind this “minimalist beauty” there is still reality. We’re still dealing with reality.

I don’t know if I’m really answering your question.

BA: I think you are. I think you’re getting exactly what I’m interested in, in terms of how the viewer can be activated and actually understand or engage the kind of electric charge that the work has. I think very much that this idea of asking the viewer to do the work is something really interesting to me with that piece.

BK: Or at least to be active and to be connected to the piece. It’s also the reason why I decided many years ago to not do films in the traditional sense. Because in a cinema theater, you are active, of course you are. But you don’t have the opportunity to experience the space as a site that you must cross, which an exhibition space allows you to do. We were talking previously about the installation in Sharjah. I also shaped it in order to allow this kind of navigation. To allow the viewer to make his own journey within the space and in between the pieces. You can start from one video to another without being obliged to follow a direction that is totally controlled by the artist.

That’s what I meant previously by working with the “interval”, this editing process that I tried to describe, and that includes the invention of a specific site for the viewer, a specific place in which the viewer is invited to interact with the piece. Because the navigations that the viewer is invited to experience also generate connections, which is also the case for The Constellations. In Beirut, I decided to not align the eight silkscreen prints, but to disseminate them throughout the space. I also invited the viewer to go from one of the constellation, then to move to another one, then to go back to the first one, then to go to further, etc. etc. So, to invite the viewer to navigate which is also a mental and imaginary process that participates in both the comprehension and the meaning of the piece as a body of works, but also as a combination of viewers contributions.

BA: I think that’s part of the beauty of the piece. By inviting the audience to be active, there’s something very transformative that’s happening. And I think that’s what I find so deeply resonant about the project. Do you feel that there are other adaptations that are possible with The Mapping Journey Project and The Constellations?

BK: It’s done.

BA: It’s done?

BK: Yes, it is.

BA: I detect a sense of relief.

BK: Well, I’m very happy that it’s done. It took me three years to achieve the whole project and it is 16 distinct pieces. Three amazing and at times challenging years, but it’s done. Now, I can start working on other projects I’ve been developing for quite some time.

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