Fanning the spark of hope in the past: Bouchra Khalili

The title of this exhibition refers to a quote from Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History in which the thinker invited us to contemplate the emancipatory potential of the past so as to make it possible for it to become a citable source in the present, and an inspiration for the future.

With this exhibition, ADN Galeria continues the retrospective look at the artist's work proposed earlier this year with the solo exhibition dedicated to her practice at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). The artist’s survey at MACBA included works produced between 2011 and 2023. ADN Galeria links together a selection of works produced between 2008 and 2022, emphasizing Khalili’s coherent 20 years of practice.

Her works operate across media –video, film, photography, printing, objects and textile– and moves freely between languages and the scholarly and the vernacular. The result is a collection of sophisticated layers of meaning and technics of storytelling forming a meditation on suppressed memory and silenced history, at the intersection of the personal and the collective.