VIENNA.- Bouchra Khalili’s first solo exhibition in Austria showcases the Moroccan-French artist’s video trilogy The Speeches Series (2012–13), a selection from the mixed media installation Foreign Office (2015), and The Tempest Society (2017), a 60 minutes film premiered at documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel. The history of international solidarity forms the narrative theme running through the exhibition, with a particular emphasis on anti-colonialism and international revolutionary liberation movements that sought to strengthen socially marginalized groups and bring about their emancipation.

Foreign Office focuses on the decade that followed Algeria’s independence and Algiers, between 1962 and 1972, became a “mecca for revolutionaries”, hosting representations of numerous international liberation movements such as The Black Panther Party, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress ANC, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement and People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola. While, by means of its protagonists, two young Algerians exploring this largely forgotten history, and cinematic montage the video offers a new perspective to the history of internationalism, the silkscreen print The Archipelago draws an abstract map of Algiers based upon the geographical dissemination of liberation movements headquarters throughout the city. These (historical) locations are also subject to the series of photographs that Bouchra Khalili took in 2015. The triptych shown at the Secession draws attention to the Algerian poet, playwright, and novelist Kateb Yacine (1929–1989) mirroring the third chapter of the film that meditates on the role of poetry and language in the transmission of history.

The video trilogy The Speeches Series is presented on monitors, and spread between different rooms, these videos play a kind of connective role. Each of its three “chapters” is composed of five speeches performed by five protagonists at times in their mother tongue, all recited from memory. The speeches in the first video, Mother Tongue, are excerpts from political or poetic texts chosen by the protagonists and deal with language and resistance; the second video Words on Streets focuses on the question of citizenship in today’s globalised world, and the final chapter, Living Labour, looks at the conditions of undocumented workers in the US reflecting on the articulation between language, citizenship, and classbelonging.

The Tempest Society is neither documentary nor fiction, but a hypothesis. Nowadays in Athens, three individuals from different backgrounds form a theatre group. Together with their audience they seek to examine the current state of Greece, Europe, and the Mediterranean on stage, which is defined as a civic space. Paying homage to Al Assifa (‘The Tempest’ in Arabic), a legendary Parisian theatre group composed of North-African immigrant workers and French students, who in the 1970s addressed the daily struggle against inequality and racism in France through the format of the “theatrical newspaper”, they name themselves The Tempest Society. On a stage in contemporary Athens, members of The Tempest Society and their guests – Ghani, a member and a spokesperson of 300 immigrant workers on hunger strike; Katerina, born in Greece but undocumented, and Malek, a young Syrian refugee – call together for equality, civic belonging, and solidarity.

In total, the exhibition presents around 2 ½ hours of filmic work.

Bouchra Khalili, who is on this year’s shortlists for two internationally renowned awards—the Hugo Boss Prize and the Artes Mundi Award—has devised a lucid and formally precise visual idiom in videos and photographs that break new ethical as well aesthetic ground at the forefront of contemporary documentary practice. With her works that effectively form visual essays, the artist weaves a kind of “alternative history.” Challenging our collective historiography, she outlines a history of the individual as narrated by its protagonists, who are members of social minorities. With these stories, which are told from generally neglected perspectives and challenge hegemonic narratives, Khalili prompts a discussion of the articulations between colonial, postcolonial history, and the current debates on global migrations.

This exhibition includes the Austrian premiere of Twenty-Two Hours (2018), Bouchra Khalili’s new film, which she realised during her recent fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, Boston, Mass.

It takes Jean Genet’s visit to the United States in early 1970 as a starting point. Responding to the call for solidarity extended by The International Section of the Black Panther Party, the French novelist, playwright and poet Genet travelled secretly to the U.S, and spent two months among Black Panthers supporting their struggle for collective emancipation and equality.

In the film, two young African-American women now investigate Genet’s commitment to the Black Panther Party and ask themselves what the position of Genet’s was in regard to the BPP? Was he a sympathizer? An ally? Or a witness?

Bouchra Khalili was born in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1975, and lives and works in Berlin. She is a Professor of Contemporary Art at Oslo National Art Academy.