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SIGNAIL
The imprisonment of bodies and the restriction of thought, the representation of identities, the determination and the control of languages, forms of care based on plants, music and colour, informal economies, alienation and resistance: these are some of the intimate experiences from which Mohamed Bourouissa works in order to create collective stories that draw on the roots of bitterness (seum in Arabic).
This first prospective retrospective in a national institution will offer an opportunity to discover the work of this artist from his most recent production to his very beginnings, alongside creations by artists to whom he is close and across jumps in time that eschew the norms of chronological order and exhaustivity. Since our world is, for Mohamed Bourouissa, a small one, the exhibition brings together several different geographies: his home town of Blida, Algeria, where the psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon developed an analysis of mental alienation amidst colonial domination; Gennevilliers, where he now lives and is active as a member of the local community; Fletcher Street in Philadelphia and its community of Black cowboys; the sky over Gaza.
Driven by a logic of the disparate, Mohamed Bourouissa stretches languages and twists references, forms, and aesthetics both personal and collective to provoke splits, reversals, and tensions, creating a third place between a haunted garden and a living organism that is at once shaped and unsettled by trouble. The exhibition is conceived as a score made up of sounds, drawings, photographs, films, sculptures, watercolours, plants, experimental music and collective energies. From cries to silence by way of the murmurs of the ghosts of colonialism, it confronts us with a singular and sharply attuned atmospheric frequency of the sensitive, and constitutes an attempt at escaping from those things that poison and intoxicate us
The artist: MOHAMED BOUROUISSA
Mohamed Bourouissa was born in 1978 in Blida (Algeria). He lives and works in Gennevilliers, and is represented by Galerie Mennour in Paris and by Blum in Los Angeles. In 2010, his work was presented at the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d'Art Moderne as part of Dynasty, a unique joint project between the neighbouring institutions that sought to highlight a new generation on the French artistic scene. Since then, he has exhibited in numerous museums (Rencontres internationales de la photographie d'Arles; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; New Museum, New York; Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Frankfurt am Main; Le Bal, Paris; Haus der Kunst, Munich) and international biennials and triennials (Sydney, Sharjah, Havana, Lyon, Venice, Algiers, Liverpool, Berlin, Milan). Mohamed Bourouissa's work features in numerous public and private collections (Centre Pompidou, Paris; SFMOMA, San Francisco; LACMA, Los Angeles; the Pinault Collection; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem).
