This exhibition presents, in its entirety, Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11), a series of videos that details the stories of eight individuals who have been forced by political and economic circumstances to travel illegally and whose covert journeys have taken them throughout the Mediterranean basin. Khalili (Moroccan-French, born 1975) encountered her subjects by chance in transit hubs across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Following an initial meeting, the artist invited each person to narrate his or her journey and trace it in thick permanent marker on a geopolitical map of the region. The videos feature the subjects’ voices and their hands sketching their trajectories across the map, while their faces remain unseen.
The stories are presented on individual screens positioned throughout MoMA's Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium. In this way, a complex network of migration is narrated by those who have experienced it, refusing the forms of representation and visibility demanded by systems of surveillance, international border control, and the news media. Shown together, the videos function as an alternative geopolitical map defined by the precarious lives of stateless people. Khalili’s work takes on the challenge of developing critical and ethical approaches to questions of citizenship, community, and political agency.
This exhibition is part of Citizens and Borders, a series of discrete projects at MoMA related to works in the collection that offer a critical perspective on histories of migration, territory, and displacement.
Organized by Stuart Comer, Chief Curator, with Giampaolo Bianconi, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance Art.
