The Circle Project. Bouchra Khalili
| Location: | Room A |
The exhibition at La Casa Encendida revisits and expands upon the project that Bouchra Khalili developed at MACBA in 2023, as part of her solo exhibition ‘Between Circles and Constellations’. In addition to this body of work, she was recently invited as the guest of honour at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, where in 2025 she presented Astérismes, a trilogy that was staged successively at three iconic theatres in and around Paris.
Following exhibitions at MoMA, the Venice Biennale, the Palais de Tokyo and MACBA, Bouchra Khalili (Casablanca, 1975) presents, for the first time in Madrid, a selection of works that explore the silenced histories of collective emancipation — workers’ movements and other civic struggles — and propose new forms of belonging and civic imagination.
The exhibition The Circle Project examines the Arab Workers’ Movement (MTA) and its theatre groups: Al Assifa (‘the storm’, in Arabic) and Al Halaka (‘the circle’, ‘the assembly’). Founded by undocumented Maghrebi workers in Paris and the south of France in 1973, and active until 1978, the MTA and its theatre groups were pioneers of immigrants’ autonomous struggles in Europe for equal labour and housing rights, as well as for cultural and artistic self-representation.
Comprising two video installations (The Circle and The Storytellers) and a mural (Timeline for a Constellation), The Circle Project creates a space where history, memory and poetry converge, highlighting the voices and legacy of the visionary members of the MTA. Here, intergenerational memory and collective knowledge are brought to life through the interplay of poetry, storytelling, performance and film editing, with the aim of inviting the public to imagine new forms of self-determination and community, and to reflect on the role of art in resisting systems of power.
Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-French artist, born in 1975 in Casablanca. She lives in Vienna and works on an itinerant basis. Her multidisciplinary practice encompasses film, video, installation, photography, screen printing, textiles and publishing. In collaboration with members of communities excluded from citizenship, she develops narrative strategies at the intersection of the subjective and the collective, and explores hypotheses about new forms of belonging.