Mohamed Bourouissa R.I.P. 2011 Mounted lambda print 1.25 x 1.43 m © Mohamed Bourouissa Courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris (Image 1/21)
Focusing on the relationship between individuals and society in fresh and unexpected ways, Algerian-born French artist Mohamed Bourouissa takes socially driven (and personally driven) art practices in intriguing new directions.
Though he broke through to international fame in the mid-to-late 2000s with his photographs of massive social unrest in the Paris suburbs, for instance, Bourouissa spent this past summer at the Art Gallery of Ontario sketching Inuit art objects from the gallery’s collection.
Other recent works and exhibitions, viewable by clicking on the Photos and Video icon above, indicate the growth of his practice and its appeal.
As Daniel Baird reports in the upcoming Fall issue of Canadian Art, which hits newsstands September 15, Bourouissa’s recent project L’Utopie d’August Sander plays off of the work of early 20th century German photographer August Sander, who sought to photograph people in various professions and social classes. For the project, Bourouissa invited people looking for work to themselves “become monuments” by entering a truck and making a scan of themselves that was transformed into a small statue by a 3-D printer.
In another recent project, All-In, Bourouissa worked with the French mint to produce a coin embossed with the image of French hip-hop artist Booba. Photographs and a film documented the making of the coins, while in another element, the coins were transformed into diptychs to bring another level of value to them. In the same project, Bourouissa made a film of a drug dealer redrawn as a PowerPoint-presenting salesman.
Collaboration is another important part of Bourouissa’s practice. In his project Temps Mort, Bourouissa asked a friend confined to a French prison to send him cellphone images of his daily life.
As the artist tells Baird in our upcoming issue, “I am interested in chance and how that can be a prism through which we can go deeper and deeper into the reality of things. I like to put different things, different images, into a kind of cosmology that is also subjective but shows how things work.”
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