“It is one of several questions raised by the exhibition,” she explains to me. “It points to the essential link between performance, artistic production, and civic imagination. The issue here is imagining other ways of forming community, beyond normative conceptions of belonging and identity.”
The theatre groups she references were not simply artistic collectives. They were part of a broader movement that sought to redefine the political landscape of France in the wake of decolonisation. Through performance, members of Al Assifa and Al Halaka attempted to imagine a community that extended beyond national identity.
“This is what the members of Al Assifa and Al Halaka, the theatre troupes of the Arab Workers’ Movement, sought to do in the 1970s by forming theatre groups to bear witness to the living and working conditions of North African immigrants in France and, above all, to show that it was possible to build alliances with French workers and students, who could form a new community on stage and beyond,” Khalili says.
The exhibition also revisits one of the movement’s most striking gestures: the symbolic presidential candidacy of Djellali Kamal in the 1974 French election. Kamal – a pseudonym adopted by an undocumented worker involved in the theatre group – ran as what was described as “the candidate of those who cannot vote.”
“This presidential candidate, an undocumented worker and performer, represented through his very anonymity the possibility of a new transnational community, freed from the limits of citizenship as defined by the nation-state,” Khalili says. “In this sense, the exhibition invites viewers to participate in the projection of a new potential community brought together by the power of performance, storytelling, imagination, and poetry.”
Rather than presenting a straightforward historical reconstruction, Khalili’s films weave together fragments of memory, performance and narration. The artist describes her approach not as research in the traditional sense but as something closer to tracing and assembling overlooked stories.
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