The exhibition at La Casa Encendida revisits and expands on the project that Bouchra Khalili developed at MACBA in 2023, as part of her solo exhibition ‘Between Circles and Constellations’. This trajectory is further enriched by her recent invitation as the Festival d’Automne de Paris’s artist of honour, where, in 2025, she presented Astérismes, a trilogy that successively occupied three emblematic theatres in Paris and its surrounding area.
Following presentations at MoMA, the Venice Biennale, Palais de Tokyo and MACBA, Bouchra Khalili (Casablanca, 1975) presents a selection of works in Madrid for the first time. These works explore 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 southern France in 1973, and active until 1978, the MTA and its theatre groups were pioneers of autonomous immigrant 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 poster (Timeline for a Constellation), The Circle Project creates a space where history, memory and poetry converge, bringing to the fore the voices and legacy of the MTA’s visionary members. Here, intergenerational memory and collective knowledge move through the articulation of poetry, storytelling, performance and film editing, inviting audiences 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 Casablanca in 1975. She lives in Vienna and works itinerantly. 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 formulates hypotheses about new forms of belonging.
