The Weaver, 2022
Woven magnetic tape and synthetic yarns
ΕΜΣΤ Collection
Acquired 2025
The Weaver is a textile made from magnetic tape, a material used in the production of video and audio recordings. The title refers to the Swiss feminist and video art pioneer Carole Roussopoulos (1945–2009), whose work has been a source of inspiration for Khalili. Roussopoulos did not describe herself as an artist, but rather as a “public writer” and “weaver”: a nomadic author who interlaces in her work the voices of struggling women, deprived of their right to define their own representations and discourse. The repeated, white, diamond-shaped motif in Khalili’s woven magnetic tapes alludes to the first portable Portapak video camera with which Roussopoulos shot her films. At the same time, The Weaver is also a work dedicated to Khalili’s homeland, Morocco, as its diamond-shaped pattern refers to traditional motifs of Moroccan tapestry, which symbolise the female figure and are used to tell stories about women, narrated by women.
The work is part of a broader project titled The Magic Lantern Project, which, on the one hand, explores the work of Carole Roussopoulos, and, on the other, connects with Khalili’s long-term research into the genealogies of postcolonial, liberation movements in the Global South and their diverse diasporic contexts. Khalili’s practice is grounded in systematic, in-depth research and encompasses a wide range of media, including moving image, printmaking, textiles, photography, publishing projects, and installations. She employs complex narrative strategies and reflective visual and sonic forms to explore agency and the ways in which members of communities often rendered invisible by the nation-state’s normative structures represent themselves.
Bouchra Khalili is a French-Moroccan visual artist, born in 1975 in Casablanca. She lives in Vienna and works across the world.
