A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers

259 - Mohamed Bourouissa

Episode Summary

Algerian-born French artist Mohamed Bourouissa on community, graffiti art, staging images, masculinity, the challenges of fatherhood, valuing your own work, art as a playground and why he’s an ‘extremely bad photographer’.

Episode Notes

Mohamed Bourouissa is an Algerian-born French artist (b. 1978) who lives and works in Paris. Mohamed's practice moves between photography, video, sculpture, and installation, often blurring the lines between these mediums. His work explores social issues, power dynamics, and the representation of marginalized communities.

He often engages with or embeds himself into specific communities for extended periods, spending significant time with individuals and groups to understand their experiences and perspectives before then creating collaborative works that challenge societal structures and explore the complexities of identity.

Mohamed's work frequently addresses the tensions between different social contexts, particularly those related to race, class, and immigration, often questioning how different social groups are represented in media and art, challenging stereotypes and seeking to offer alternative narratives.

His work has been exhibited in major museums and biennials worldwide, and in 2020 he received the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for his retrospective exhibition featured in the Arles Festival the previous year.

Mohamed currently has a major solo show at Fondazione MAST in Bologna Italy, curated by Francesco Zanot. The exhibition is entitled Communautés and features four notable works produced over a twenty year span between 2005 and this year - Péripherique, Horse Day, Shoplifters and Hands.

In episode 259, Mohamed discusses, among other things:

The sense of community growing up in the Parisian suburbs
His early experiences as a graffiti artist
His first project, Nous Somme Halles
The 2005 riots that preceded Péripherique
Why he decided to stage images… and why he sketches the images out first
The theme of masculinity and his own experience of growing up without a father present
The challenges of being a dad
Knowing that he wanted to be an artist
How artists must value their own work and learn to say no
His project Horse Day and how it came about
Art as a playground
His new project, Hands
How he arrives at the choice of medium and the factors that inflence that choice
Why he is, in his own words, an ‘extremely bad photographer’

Referenced:

Website | Instagram

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