Artist Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978, Blida, Algeria) is known for confronting complex socio-economic issues and for seeking out tensions between different social contexts. In-depth research, including long periods of engagement with specific locales and groups, inform works that question collective histories, uses of public space, and representational identities. This solo survey show featured new and existing works by Bourouissa across photography, sound, installation and moving image made since 2003, in what was his first solo show with a UK public institution.

His celebrated work Horse Day (2014-15) was included in the exhibition, and saw the artist live for eight months among a low-income community in North Philadelphia to create an event and film with the horse riders of its urban stables – making, as he terms it, a contemporary American cowboy movie. The charged legacies of colonialism, and contemporary realities of racial and socioeconomic inequality, were presented throughout Bourouissa’s work; including the recent Brutal Family Roots (2020), which fuses hip-hop with installation to track patterns of exchange between Britain, Australia, France and Algeria, through the spread of the Acacia tree species.

Throughout his work, Bourouissa builds poetics by examining contemporary society; often documenting disenfranchised groups and individuals who have been “left behind at the crossroads of integration and exclusion”, but who use the tools at their disposal to navigate their situation. For example, a new work HARA!!!!!!hAAARAAAAA!!!!!hHARAAA!!! (2020) abstracted the invented word ‘hara’ used by young lookouts to alert drug dealers of approaching police in Marseilles. The distorted word became a sound installation in the vein of concrete poetry.

The presentation of Bourouissa’s work in the context of the gallery brought into relief different circulations of images and their economies. These circuits, their violence and corruptibility, were exploited and disrupted in works such as ALL IN (2012) and Shoplifters (2014). In these, as with all his works, Bourouissa moves between different modes of photographic and filmic techniques with irreverence and instinct. From grainy smartphone images in works like Temps Mort (2008-9) – in which the artist exchanged images, videos and messages with an incarcerated friend – to street photography in Nous Sommes Halles (2003-5), and canonical art historical framings of Parisian street life via Delacroix in the series Périphéries (2006-8); each mode and medium is exploited for its ability to conceptually articulate incisive statements on contemporary image culture and a racialised social fabric of inequality.

Exhibition Guide

The exhibition moved to a new form to Kunsthal Charlottenberg, Denmark (9 Oct 2021–22 Feb 2022).

BIOGRAPHY

Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978, Blida, Algeria) currently lives and works in Paris, France. He has exhibited at institutions and biennials including: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, FR; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, US; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NE; basis, Frankfurt, DE; Le Bal, Paris, FR; Haus der Kunst, Munich, DE; FRAC Franche-Comté, Besançon, FR; Sharjah, Havana, Lyon, Venice, Algiers, Liverpool and Berlin Biennales; Milan Triennial, Milan, IT.

SUPPORTED BY

Fluxus Art Projects
Trampoline
kamel mennour, Paris/London

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