Bouchra Khalili @Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig
June 8, 2022
Discover Bouchra Khalili’s The Typographer at the latest Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig’s exhibition Flashback: forward.
The show proposes a kind of study room that is accessible to everyone, allowing an artistic discursive frame of reference which is related to teaching and the academy’s ways of operating and representing itself.
The Typographer refers to the avant-garde writer Jean Genet’s training as an orphan school child: the typographic practice. Khalili focuses on the profession of the typographer in France as a tool for the circulation of revolutionary ideas among the working-class. Khalili’s film depicts a typographer typesetting and printing the last sentence Genet wrote during his lifetime.
The video shot in 16mm and in black and white, the use of celluloid film operates here as a metaphor of cinema as a technique of typesetting for images, emphasizing the nomadic power of words and images to navigate throughout minds, time, and media.
Flashback: forward is open until June 25th, 2022 . Don’t miss it!