Untitled still from Horse Day, 2014. Photography by Lucia Thomé. Courtesy of Mennour Archives, Paris
Some 20 years after Périphérique, a new exhibition collates the artist’s celebrated series with three others to deepen his focus on the subject of cultural representation
Mohamed Bourouissa is concerned with social fabrics, the threads that bind and the hands that weave. Born in Algeria and raised in France from the age of five, his central concerns began at the Sorbonne. After a day of learning the canon of Western art history, he would return home to the banlieues, the city-skirting suburbs categorised as ‘rough’, home to immigrants and hooded adolescents, all allegedly up to no good. In the wake of the 2005 Paris riots, Bourouissa became increasingly sensitive to an undeniable racial disparity in the European visual lexicon.
The weapon of photographic sight became his counter-reactionary tool. Putting his friends into the image, he subverted its well-documented ability to construct notions of racial identity and build new ways of seeing migrant and diasporic communities. “I’m always thinking about communities, particularly mine,” he says. “I’m interested in plurality – and in the image I can be pragmatic. The Arab community was not visible in France; I wanted to represent the people I saw around myself, the people who were doing the same graffiti as me, listening to the same music as me. Photography gave me that.”
Now, after 20 years, countless exhibitions, a Deutsche Börse prize, and a Venice and Berlin Biennale, Bourouissa is still tackling the beast of representation. Communautés. Projets 2005–2025 at Fondazione MAST, Bologna, is a “skeleton of a retrospective”, presenting two sets of curatorially paired series. Horse Day and Périphérique alternate the exhibition’s first section, while Shoplifters nestles between a new series, Hands. In Périphérique, the artist employs friends and neighbours to stage mise-en-scènes, blurring codes between history painting and racially biased documentary; in Horse Day he slow-documents an African American community in Philadelphia, and their fanciful equestrian companions. In Shoplifters, the artist reproduces bodega Polaroids of would-be thieves in Brooklyn, each forced to pose alongside their stolen goods (milk, eggs, cheese, detergents and so on).
“We are here”
Finally, in new work finished mere weeks before the opening, Bourouissa reutilises his archive to produce multimedia, metal-heavy assemblages, caged vertical vitrines featuring hands and faces, trapped in an aesthetically balanced, hauntingly spectral cage of plexiglass and metal. Francesco Zanot’s curation of two sections clefts the show in half, literally bridged by MAST’s third-floor walkway; re-represented communities reunderstood by the artist’s lens, followed by later works, harder to process, bitter to taste. Repression and poverty, and the unfair weight of it on people of colour and immigrants, are painful topics to explore. But Bourouissa entirely dedicates himself to them.
Much of the show is mounted on metal grids, giving the feeling of cages, hygienic and dissociative enclosures akin to contemporary images of the ‘megaprisons’ currently being developed and populated in El Salvador, America and the UK. Other visual cues include automated warehouses and state-of-the-art-museum storage. The aesthetics of modern confinement are littered across the show. The cage is sterile, orderly, a well-oiled system, as much industrial as carceral.
Across Hands, metal grills become part of the assemblage. A 180-degree spin and the viewer is hit by the difficult, arresting portraits of Shoplifters, enclosed in an amber of racially charged, criminalised poverty. “I really wanted Shoplifters included. I think this series is very important to my practice. It’s a different type of language,” the artist says. Some have described Shoplifters as absolution, a transmutation of ‘thieves’ into quasi-religious icons of defiance. If this is the case, then Hands extends this martyrdom; the works are not just in dialogue, they shout in mutual pain.
When asked about the reception of his work, and what he thinks people get wrong, Bourouissa takes a long pause. “Some people might relegate it, they see it as cool pictures about young men and maleness,” he says. “They see the guy from the banlieue making works about the banlieue. But conceptually, they don’t focus on deep thought. Maybe they see the first layer of the image, but it doesn’t lead them to question their perception of the image. All I’m doing is questioning perceptions of what [the viewer] sees in my pictures. It is what it is; if you don’t do the job of looking past that first layer, you don’t get to the tension. My work is in the tension.”
MAST often showcases exhibitions focusing on the intersection between photography and industry; in Communautés. Projets 2005–2025, perhaps the industry in question is the global image culture in which we are now trapped. It could also be the automotive industry, progenitor of many of Bourouissa’s increasingly ambitious metalwork assemblages. Here, the prison industrial complex – an industry as transparent as it is opaque – is inescapable. Jail is often employed as a metaphor, but Bourouissa flips that dynamic, making everything a metaphor for the prison.
For two decades Bourouissa has staked the claim that these young Black and Arab men are not antonyms of their respective nations; they are not a juxtaposition, a reappropriation, or a foil. They are in fact nothing new, but the next generation. The men of the banlieues are as French as any other, and hold a civic right to the nation’s cultural imaginary – and not just in its nightmares. Bourouissa sums it all up matter-of-factly: “We are here.”
Mohamed Bourouissa: Communautés. Projets 2005–2025 is at Fondazione MAST, Bologna, until 28 September 2025. mohamedbourouissa.com
