Emerging international artist, Mohamed Bourouissa arose to fame with a photographic series about the young people living in the suburbs of Paris. The way they were staged was reminiscent both of the news broadcasts and motifs from old masters like Gericault, Caravaggio or Vermeer. Using a wide variety of artistic practices, his work continues to strongly capture topics often put in the margin of society, like with his film Temps mort, an SMS dialogue between the artist and an inmate. Caught between poetry and realism, the scenarios imagined by Mohamed Bourouissa explore the social and economical problems at stake in the so-called inner cities while addressing the relationship between these populations and the figures of authority with a very personal empathy.
French artist MOHAMED BOUROUISSA produces photographs and videos that deal with the peripheral condition in a haunting, direct and thought-provoking manner.
Produced during the period of 2005 to 2008, the series Périphéries (pictures above) coincided with the aftermath of the 2005 riots in the eastern Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, sparking the civil unrest and escalating racial tension that spread throughout the urban centers of France.
While each photograph presents a tense composition that simulates the vérité of photojournalistic work, BOUROUISSA‘s photographs are in actuality deftly staged, fictional depictions of the predominantly Arab and African communities that inhabit these geographically and socially peripheral areas. Aptly named after the Boulevard Périphérique, this series of photographs references the ring-road surrounding Paris that more so divides than connects, addressing the stigmatized communities that exist on the ‘other’ side of this physical and metaphorical barrier.
MOHAMED BOUROUISSA was born in 1978 in Blida, in Algeria. He now lives and works in Paris. After graduating in Visual Arts from the Sorbonne, Paris I (2004) and the photography department of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, he trained at the Studio National des Arts – Le Fresnoy in 2008-2010. Since 2008, his work has been shown in France at the MAMVP/Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the New York New Museum of Contemporary Art (United States), the Finish Museum of Photography of Helsinki (Finland), the Central Farming Correios of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Yossi Milo Gallery (New York) or MAXXI in Rome among others.