Bouchra Khalili

Seven of the eight videos in Bouchra Khalili’s series “The Mapping Journey Project” (2008–11) each clock in at roughly four minutes, enough time to narrate illegal journeys that are transnational (Jalalabad to Rome, Tunis to Marseille) and domestic (Ramallah to Jerusalem). One entry, Mapping Journey #5 (2010), however, is more than twice as long as the others. It traces a Bangladeshi man’s five-year odyssey from Dhaka to Delhi, Moscow, Skopje, back to Dhaka, then to Dubai, with stops in Mali, Niger and Libya before reaching Lampedusa in Sicily. His path is riddled with administrative, security and financial hurdles on three continents. All of this is undertaken, the man notes, to support his family. His story represents the hundreds of thousands of narratives of labor migrants from Bangladesh who temporarily relocate to the Gulf States each year. Like the rest of the series, this video collapses time and space: the disembodied hands of our narrators outline trajectories on paper maps as they recount their own stories of migration. The durational nature of these works, combined with their narrative arc, offers an intimate treatment of a controversial topic, indicating that migration is, at its core, a story about individual people.

In her first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom at Lisson Gallery, the Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili explores the representation of contemporary migration. Most recently displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, “The Mapping Journey Project” demonstrates that squeezing the complexity of migration into neatly packaged anecdotes comes at the cost of schematic reduction, which “The Constellations Series” (2011) interprets in a minimalist fashion, drawing linear routes against a monochromatic blue background. Each of the eight terrestrial journeys described in “The Mapping Journey Project” is presented as a silkscreen print of a constellation chart. National borders and their attendant geographies disappear, leaving only a dotted line connecting stars that also represent stations in the expedition. Khalili mines her own practice to find alternative representations to maps and of our relations to borders and states, suggesting that these connections are, paradoxically, irreducibly complex. Abstraction eliminates the baggage of nationhood, geopolitics and history, but allows viewers to consider the arbitrariness of establishing these divisions.