Bouchra Khalili and KJ Abudu in conversation

Published in Living with Ghosts: A Reader, this extensive, essayistic interview delves into the work of artist and filmmaker Bouchra Khalili, whose works featured in both the first and second iterations of Living with Ghosts.

“During our conversation, we unpack Khalili’s varied critical impulses, conceptual methodologies, and aesthetic influences, covering a fifteen-year span of the artist’s focused, accumulative practice, from The Mapping Journey Project, 2008-2011, to Foreign Office, 2015, to the recently produced The Magic Lantern, 2022. These film-based installation works sensitively explore subterranean histories of (post)colonial worldly entanglement, moving effortlessly between the mid-20th century era of Third World revolutionary struggle, the contemporary Mediterranean migration crisis, and constellative genealogies of lens-based media technologies. Without doubt, what we find here – via our discussion of montage, orality, historiography, political solidarity, and filmic ontology – is a committed art practice that speaks on, with, through, and beyond the thematic concerns of Living with Ghosts.”

Image: Bouchra Khalili, Foreign Office, 2015, video still. Courtesy of the artist and Mor Charpentier.