6 p.m. on a Friday evening at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the crowds of Toronto art goers were streaming out, some of them funnelling down Frank Gehry’s magnificent serpentine ramp. But the museum wasn’t entirely emptying out, since French artist Mohamed Bourouissa, who had just arrived for his summer residency at the AGO as part of the Paris-Toronto series sponsored by the Consulat général de France à Toronto, was just settling into his small studio on the concourse level.
“I’m always asked about Algeria, about being Algerian,” says the elegant, slender, 35-year-old artist, his jet black beard neatly trimmed. “But although I was born in Algeria to Muslim Algerian parents, I grew up in the suburbs of Paris, and I think of myself as French.” And Bourouissa’s French credentials are impressive. He received his undergraduate degree in visual arts at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2004 and also received a diploma from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs with a specialization in photography. He then received additional training at the acclaimed, multimedia-oriented Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains. And from early in his career, Bourouissa has been in demand internationally, having exhibited his work at places like the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the New Museum in New York.
Bourouissa is indeed a French rather than an Algerian artist, and he reflects the relatively new, multicultural face of what it means to be French in the 21st century. Not so long ago, most of us in North America instinctively associated French art with figures like Jean-Léon Gérôme, Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet and Henri Matisse, and France with the grace, charm and beauty of the narrow streets and rambling boulevards of the centre of Paris. But in October of 2005, riots broke out in those Parisian suburbs with largely African and North African residents, triggered by three boys being chased by police in Clichy-sous-Bois. They fled into a power station and were electrocuted (two of them died), blacking out the neighborhood. The riots went on for weeks, and spread across Paris’s suburbs and then across France. Suddenly, Paris became associated less with the cafés of Montparnasse or the lovely 6th arrondissement and more with burning police cars, clouds of tear gas and angry, rock-throwing youths in the city’s grungy, poor, congested Périphérique.
It should come as no surprise that Bourouissa’s first landmark series of photographs is entitled Périphérique (2005–08), an extended study of the complicated, and often volatile, dynamics of the neighbourhoods in which he grew up. While Bourouissa’s finely wrought colour photography captures everyday moments (“What I am after is that fleeting tenth of a second when the tension is at its most extreme,” he has said), he is by no means a documentary street photographer in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson or Robert Frank: Bourouissa’s immediate ancestors are photographers like Jeff Wall and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, as well as the great painters of history like Delacroix, Géricault, Francisco Goya and Manet. Like Wall’s images, Bourouissa’s scenes are carefully staged and cinematically lit, but whereas Wall’s work is self-consciously unnatural, spacious and panoramic, Bourouissa’s is dense, intimate, and at times explosive. “I start with the conceptual dimension and see how that is related to the form,” he says, “but I only photograph things that I have a connection with—my work is often very personal.”
In La République (2006), for instance, young black men on a slope in leather jackets, black caps and white toques—the whole scene glaringly backlit by car headlights—point at a man wearing a red arm band who looks up towards a French tricoleur on the roof of a low, concrete building. The image seems to allude to Géricault’s dramatic The Raft of the Medusa (1819), in which a black man waves a flag from the prow of a rickety wooden life raft in heavy seas, while those who are still alive point desperately toward it. In The Raft of the Medusa the ragged flag is a symbol of hope and the possibility of redemption amid shipwreck and cannibalism and gruesome death; in Bourouissa’s image it is draped over division and confusion. In L’impasse (2008), three black men stand around a burned-out car in a ratty back alley, the walls spattered and peeling, another stands on the car’s roof, his head cut off by the upper edge of the image. One imagines that the man on the roof is making some kind of mock-heroic gesture, the man directly below him looking up with an expression of bemusement and contempt. The impasse here is the impotence that inevitably follows urban riots: after the eruption of delirious, and, for a moment, liberating fury, everyone is left with the wreckage and little else. And in the tense Le téléphone (2008), a black man, his back tight against the picture’s foreground, is in the midst of a smoldering, face-to-face confrontation with a white man, eyes locked, while behind them another black man records the incident with his cell phone. Like L’impasse, Le téléphone is about a kind of impotence: the impending violence is recorded rather than stopped.
“I am interested in chance,” Bourouissa says, “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.” The images in Périphérique appear rigorously composed, but unlike someone like Wall or diCorcia, Bourouissa allows his subjects to determine the scene, so what he eventually captures is a result of collaboration and partly outside of his control.
This form of collaboration, and the indeterminacy it gives rise to, is taken to a wholly different level in Temps mort (2008–09), which literally means “dead time.” For Temps mort, Bourouissa asked a friend who is confined to a French prison (he is referred to by the initials “JC”) to take cell phone images of his daily life and to send him SMS messages; the result is a series of grainy, blown-up still images and an 18-minute film that consists of a montage of the images and texts. Temps mort provides a bleak portrait of the tawdriness and waste of prison life in France—or anywhere, for that matter. In one image, the prisoner has his back to the viewer and is gazing out through what looks like an animal’s cage. Another image is just a shot of an empty, sterile, brightly lit corridor, cell doors on either side, and still another is a dark, blurry shot of a giant coil of razor wire atop the prison’s fence. In prison, one literally kills time, and Temps mort is a desolating vision of someone doing just that: eating, sleeping, doing push ups, standing around gazing out of the cage. Yet the world of Temps mort is hardly different from that of the people in Périphérique: they are mostly standing around in back alleys or the garbage strewn parks between housing projects, waiting for a pointless fight to break out.
One of Bourouissa’s most recent projects, L’Utopie d’August Sander (2012–13), which was on view at the Hors Pistes festival at the Pompidou this spring, pushes up against the limits of photography. Sander was the great, early-20th century German portrait photographer whose thirty-year project, People of the Twentieth Century (1910–40), depicted German citizens in the clothes that reflected their roles and classes: soldiers in uniforms, bakers in bakers’ clothes, miners in miners’ clothes. Sander’s world was, at least initially, a world of types and a stable social order, with everyone solidly in place. For L’Utopie d’August Sander, Bourouissa asked those looking for work to themselves “become monuments” by entering a truck and making a scan of themselves which was then transformed into a small statue by a 3-D printer. If Temps mort undermines anything like a romantic reading of Périphérique, then the diminutive anti-monuments fabricated in L’Utopie d’August Sander challenges the capacity of photography to create the kind of representative icons Sander, and many others, were trying to produce. In Bourouissa’s world, there are no types, just individuals, and most of them seem lost.
“When I feel something, something tells me to go this way or that,” Bourouissa reflects. “I like to find the question first and then the point of view of the question, and then see where it goes, see what its implications are.” For all the political resonance of his work, and for all its evident conceptual framing, Bourouissa is essentially an intuitive artist, devoted to the exigencies, and vagaries, of the moment. Sitting in front of his computer in an otherwise empty studio on an empty floor of the AGO, in a city he had arrived at only days earlier and whose principal language (Canadian bilingualism aside) he does not really speak, he had no idea what he was planning to do for his residency project. He was waiting for chance to do its work.
This is a feature article from the Fall 2013 issue of Canadian Art. To read more from this issue, view its table of contents or pick up a copy at a local or digital newsstand. To discover more recent works by Mohamed Bourouissa, go to canadianart.ca/bourouissa.
