The Mapping Journey Project by Bouchra Khalili at Louisiana Museum

Combining the traditions of post-independence avant-gardes and conceptual practices, Khalili’s work suggests poetical hypotheses for newer imaginations of community.

Overview

The exhibition presents a selection of works by Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili, whose multidisciplinary practice develops collaborative strategies of storytelling with members of communities excluded from citizen membership.

The piece around which the exhibition is structured is The Mapping Journey Project, 2008-2011, a large-scale video installation. The piece is a recent acquisition for the museum’s collection, and this is its first presentation in Denmark. Most recently, it was featured in the main exhibition Foreigners Everywhere at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

In The Mapping Journey Project, eight individuals recount their forced illegal journeys. As they narrate their tortuous and often year-long journeys, each person traces their individual travel route on a map. The journeys are driven by both political and economic circumstances and span from North and East Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, across the Mediterranean, West Africa and Europe’s borders. These singular itineraries emphasize the persistence of the human being in search for a better shared future.

The Constellations Series, the closing chapter of The Mapping Journey Project, poetically reformulates and illuminates the video installation. The eight silkscreen prints translate the narrated journeys in the form of constellations of stars, referring to ancient astronomy as rooted in mythology. Khalili invites viewers to actively project themselves into the constellation to collectively imagine other ways to belong.

Other works in the exhibition add multilayered historicized perspectives on new imaginations of community beyond restrictive conceptions of identity and belonging.