Project Gallery:
Bouchra Khalili

Bouchra Khalili (b.1975) investigates the experiences of identity, immigration, and transience. Working primarily in film and video, she reflects the nomadic and often transnational state of existence that defines life for many people throughout the world. Khalili uses a mode of poetic documentation to illuminate the lived realities of an increasingly mobilized world. Her newest work, commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami, is the third and final chapter of The Speeches Series. A video trilogy (2012-2013). Each of these incisive, unadorned works focuses on the act of speaking, featuring five individuals who give powerful, subjective accounts of their personal experiences amid larger political and economic spheres.

Khalili’s videos provide a vehicle through which her subjects deliver affecting speeches, expressing their own complex status within their adopted and native homelands in the language of their choice. Speeches - Chapter 1: Mother Tongue (2012) addresses language itself through a reinterpretation of famous political texts from history. Shot in Genoa, Italy, Speeches - Chapter 2: Words on Streets (2013), explores issues of citizenship, belonging, and nationalism through original manifestos written and presented by each subject. The last chapter of The Speeches Series, which will debut at PAMM, was produced in New York and focuses on immigrants who live and work in the city. These subjects reveal the political consciousness inherent to their clandestine lives and labor, creating a meaningful and urgent discourse on the contemporary, immigrant working class.

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