Exhibitions cycle: WHAT IF WOMEN RULED THE WORLD? Part 4

Lanternists and Typographers is Bouchra Khalili’s first solo exhibition in Greece. The exhibition includes three works: The Magic Lantern Project (2019–2022), The Typographer (2019), and The Radical Ally (2019). Through a deeply researched and meticulous practice that encompasses moving image, printmaking, installation, textile, photography, and editorial platforms, Khalili uses complex strategies of storytelling and self-reflexive visual and sonic forms for exploring notions of agency and self-representation of members of communities rendered invisible by the nation-state model. Her multi-layered works weave together personal and collective histories and memories for suggesting hypotheses of emancipatory notions of community.

The Magic Lantern (mixed media installation: film, objects, textile, silkscreen prints, 2019–2022) reactivates the art of the phantasmagoria, a technology of the late 18th century that combined projected imagery with performances of storytelling in order to summon ghosts “to speak in public”. Khalili’s installation takes as a starting point The Nero of Amman, the lost first video work by Swiss feminist video pioneer Carole Roussopoulos (1945–2009). The film disappeared due to the numerous projections that erased it, as at the time, a master tape would have served for both filming and broadcasting.

Carole Roussopoulos has appeared in previous works by Khalili such as Foreign Office (2015) and Twenty-Two Hours (2018), two pieces that investigate the position of the artist not as someone speaking on behalf or in lieu of someone else, but rather with the artist as witness. With its multiple components, The Magic Lantern poetically meditates on a potential “spectrology”, summoning the ghosts of history to “speak in public” in the present-time and from or for the future.

The Typographer (a 16mm silent film) references Jean Genet’s training in typography. Khalili’s film depicts a female typographer, typesetting and printing the last sentence Genet wrote during his lifetime, which forms the epigraph of his posthumous epic poem, Prisoner of Love: “Put all the images in language in a place of safety and make use of them, for they are in the desert, and it’s in the desert we must go and look for them.” The Radical Ally was produced after the making of Twenty-Two Hours, a film by Khalili examining Genet’s commitment to the campaign for the liberation of Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, who was arbitrarily detained in 1970.

The exhibition is funded by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan “Greece 2.0”, funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU.

Curator: Daphne Vitali