A Question of Inheritance: Bouchra Khalili's Decolonial Spectropoetics | MACBA

This essay was published in the accompanying catalogue to Bouchra Khalili’s mid-career retrospective, Between Circles and Constellations, presented at MACBA Barcelona and the Sharjah Art Foundation. The essay elaborates some core concepts touched upon in our extensive conversation published in Living with Ghosts: A Reader. Reflecting on various works in Khalili’s film-based practice, which all centre the spectral anti-colonial legacies of mid-twentieth century tricontinental solidarity, I mobilise Khalili’s formal deployment of montage and “free indirect speech” (à la Pier Paolo Pasolini and Gilles Deleuze) to consider the essay-film and moving images as performative, material conduits for the inheritance of decolonial futural visions.