ART-PRESENTATION: Mohamed Bourouissa-Hustling
Mohamed Bourouissa is known for his direct, imposing color photographs of young people, immigrants, and everyday life in the Paris suburbs. Bourouissa is fascinated by systems, how society is structured, and how social processes are activated. Unlike traditional socially critical photographers, he always works within and in collaboration with communities.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Kamel Mennour Archive
Mohamed Bourouissa in his solo exhibition “Hustling” at Gallery kamel mennour in London presents works from his project “Horseday” (2013- ). For this project, Bourouissa collaborated with the black community of the Philadelphia-based Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club. Bourouissa, first saw his subjects in Martha Camarillo’s photographs. Subsequently, he came on a reconnaissance trip and in 2014, moved for eight months to Philadelphia where he won the trust of many members of the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood. Inspired by the role that horses, stables, and riding play in the life of this Afro-American community, Bourouissa spent 8 months in Philadelphia, drawing, photographing and filming this community, building many personal relationships in the process. Out of this, came photographs, films and three-dimensional works. The exhibition “Hustling” focuses on the assemblages, which the artist began in his Paris studio in 2015. The wall-mounted reliefs and floor-standing sculptures comprise arrangements of fragments of car bodywork, trimmed or cut into asymmetric and jagged forms, onto which the artist has printed his photographs of local scenes, streets and riders in a non-digital silver gelatin process. In a gesture of social reversal typical for his work, informed by the discourses of identity politics, Bourouissa takes the conventionally white American culture of cars and Western and presents us with its appropriation by a black community. Since 2002 Mohamed Bourouissa has been developing a photography practice, drawing, and creating video rooted in social reality. For him, an image is an idea. Like Jeff Wall, his images give the impression of having been taken on the spot but are the result of cinematographic staging based in advance on specific sketches designed by him. Working primarily with representations of a contemporary urban environment, he is interested in the stereotypes associated with geographic and social spaces like the suburbs in “Périphérique” (2005-08), or prison in “Temps mort” (2009).
Info: Galerie Kamel Mennour, 51 Brook Street, London, Duration: 31/1-26/2/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:30, www.kamelmennour.com
