Exhibition and Public Lecture by Mohamed Bourouissa: Le Miroir (The Mirror)
When: October 10 through December 30, 2011
Public Lecture: Monday, November 7 from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., Reception, immediately following from 7:30-8:30 p.m.
France-Atlanta, in partnership with SCAD, presented a solo exhibition of photographs by French artist Mohamed Bourouissa, guest curated by lecturer, art critic and independent curator Simon Njami.
Le Miroir (The Mirror) is a way to address metaphorically any given society. In Mohamed Bourouissa’s case, it is a statement on how people perceive otherness. For the mirror does not only reflect an individual image but it reflects a society in all its complexity. Playing on constructions of “us” and “the other”, his work seeks to deconstruct the frozen image of the suspect that the other has always been.
A public discussion with Mohammed Bourouissa took place on November 7.
Born in 1978 in Blida, Algeria, Mohamed Bourouissa graduated in Visual Arts at Sorbonne, Paris I and the photography department of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris. He later trained at the Studio National des Arts – Le Fresnoy in 2008-2010.
This artist focuses on photography as well as drawing and video works deeply rooted in social reality. Primarily working around representations of a contemporary urban environment Bourouissa is interested in geographical and social spaces usually represented by stereotypes. By reformulating these stereotypes into compositions of a great formal rigor, he creates images where the strangeness and built up tension prevail, as an alternative to the dominant trend. The works of Mohamed Bourouissa function like allegories, tightly interweaving a fictional dynamics with their documentary dimension.
Bourouissa’s work 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) and the Central Farming Correios of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), among others. 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).
He currently lives and works in Paris.
image: © Mohamed Bourouissa, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
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