Mohamed Bourouissa

Since 2002, Mohamed Bourouissa has been developing a fine art photography practice but also drawing and video works deeply rooted in social reality. Primarily working around representations of a contemporary urban environment, the artist is interested in geographical and social spaces usually represented by stereotypes. Suburbs (Périphérique, 2005-2008), prison (Temps mort, 2009) or television (the Ecran series, 2007).
He reformulates the stereotypes into compositions of a great formal rigor, qualified as “emotional geometry” by fellow artist Florence Paradéis. He thus creates images where the strangeness and built up tension prevail, as an alternative to the dominant trend. Inspired by painting (Theodore Géricault, Eugene Delacroix or Caravaggio) and contemporary photography (Jeff Wall, Garcia di Lorca), the works of Mohamed Bourouissa function like allegories, tightly interweaving a fictional dynamics with their documentary dimension.

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, the work of Mohammed Bourouissa 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) or the Central Farming Correios of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).
He has taken part in international biennials such as the 6th Berlin Biennial (Germany), the Architecture and Photography Biennial of La Cambre in Brussels (Belgium), the Algiers Biennial of Contemporary Art (Algeria) or the Rencontres de Bamako (Mali).