Published February 2026. Available to pre-order now.

The Circle: Timeline for a Constellation concludes Bouchra Khalili’s ten-year investigation into the Arab Workers Movement (MTA), focusing on its theatre troupes, Al Assifa (the tempest) and Al Halaka (the circle, the assembly). Formed by undocumented North African workers in France (1973-1978), the MTA’s theatre groups were central elements in Khalili’s works The Tempest Society (2017) and the book of the same title (Book Works, 2019), the sound piece An Audio Family Album (2020) and the multi-screen film installations The Circle, and The Storytellers (2023) and The Public Storyteller (2024).

The publication brings together archival materials, chronological elements, essays, interviews with members of Al Assifa and Al Halaka, performers from The Circle, and a contribution and conversations with the artist. This ‘constellated’ examination highlights the MTA theatre troupes’ pioneering exploration of emancipatory belonging, agency, and artistic expression as fundamental human rights. These experiments culminated in the 1974 presidential candidacy of Djellali Kamal, an anonymous member of Al Assifa. Despite remaining anonymous, Kamal’s candidacy symbolized the potential for a new, egalitarian community, brought to life through performance.

This publication invites a new generation of readers to reflect on the lasting legacy of Al Assifa and Al Halaka, exploring how performance and storytelling can harness transformative civic power.

The publication expands on the video installation The Circle Project (2023), which premiered at the 15th Sharjah Biennial (2023) and won the Biennale Prize, then at MACBA (2023) and Luma Foundation (Arles, 2023-2024; Zurich, 2025). A french edition of this book was published by Paraguay Press in conjunction with Bouchra Khalili’s multi-site solo exhibitions organized as part of the 2025 Festival d’Automne, for which she was the guest visual artist.

This edition will be published alongside the exhibition Bouchra Khalili: Circles and Storytellers, at The Mosaic Rooms, 18.02.26 – 14.06.26.

Texts by: Bouchra Khalili, Mohamed Amer Meziane, Abdellali Hajjat. Interviews: KJ Abudu, Saïd Bouziri, Hedi Akkari, Smaïne Idri, Mustapha Mohammadi, Philippe Tancelin, Mia Radford, Lucas Yahiaoui. Graphic Design by: Pascal Sémur.

Bouchra Khalili is a French-Moroccan artist born in Casablanca in 1975, based in Vienna and working on a travelling basis. She studied film history at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and visual arts at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy. Her multidisciplinary practice encompasses film, video, installation, photography, screen printing, textiles, and publishing. Collaborating with members of communities excluded from citizenship, she develops strategies of storytelling at the intersection of the subjective and the collective, and proposes hypotheses for suggesting new forms of belonging inherited from narratives of collective emancipation that have been erased from official histories. Bouchra Khalili’s work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2025), Luma Westbau (2025), Sharjah Art Foundation (2024), EMST (2024), Macba (2023), Bildmuseet (2021), Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (2019), Museum Folkwang (2018), Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (2018), MAXXI Museum (2018), MoMA (2016). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (2024, 2013), the Sharjah Biennial (2023, 2011), the Sydney Biennial (2026, 2012), and documenta 14 (2017). In 2023, her work The Circle received the Sharjah Biennial Prize and in 2017 The Tempest Society was awarded the Ibsen Prize. Bouchra Khalili heads the Department of Artistic Strategies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and is co-founder of the Cinémathèque de Tanger.