Bouchra Khalili
25th Biennale of Sydney, Australia
14 March - 14 June 2026
Founded in 1973, the Biennale of Sydney is one of the world’s leading festivals for international contemporary art. Since its inception, the Biennale has commissioned more than 2,400 artists, transforming the city’s museums, galleries and public spaces into platforms for experimentation and cultural exchange. The 25th edition, curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, is titled Rememory. This curatorial framework revisits repressed histories, exploring how acts of recollection can reclaim such narratives.
For the 25th Sydney Biennale, Bouchra Khalili will present The Circle (2023). This work revisits the revolutionary political organisation known as the Arab Workers Movement (MTA) and its theatre groups, which were active in France in the mid-1970s. Combining archival research, theatre and film, the work reconstructs a 1974 episode when a young MTA member was nominated as a French presidential candidate – a symbolic protest against the exclusion of migrant workers from civil rights. Through visual storytelling, Khalili reanimates this history of collective resistance, highlighting the power of performance as political action and assertion of agency.
Bouchra Khalili (born 1975 in Casablanca) is a Vienna-based artist and a professor at the Academy of Applied Arts. Her practice encompasses film, installation and graphic art. Her work is rooted in oral history and documentary, giving voice to migrant and diasporic communities, and exploring how collective storytelling can shape political consciousness. Through carefully constructed visual and narrative structures, Khalili reclaims forgotten histories.
This is the artist’s first collaboration with Phileas.
This project was aided by a research trip to Vienna by the curator Hoor Al Qasimi, organised by Phileas in January 2025.
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25th Biennale of Sydney, Australia
