Mohamed Bourouissa Reframes Life on the Margins

Migration, systems of control and shifting power dynamics are among the urgent themes addressed in ‘Communautés. Projets 2005–2025’, Franco-Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa’s latest exhibition. Curated by Francesco Zanot, and displayed across Fondazione MAST in Bologna, this major project brings together four series from the last two decades of Bourouissa’s prolific practice, foregrounding his commitment to representing communities typically excluded from dominant narratives – residents of the French banlieues, Black equestrians in Philadelphia and others whose social visibility is often denied.

Bourouissa’s work resists simple classification. His multilayered practice moves fluidly between photography and sculpture to collage, drawing and video installation. Across Bourouissa’s images, the subjects are not passive figures, but observers and active interpreters of a society that seeks to make them invisible, transforming them into participants in acts of staged resistance.

Opening the exhibition is ‘Périphérique’ (2005–08), an iconic photographic series that comprises meticulously staged scenes featuring the artist’s friends and acquaintances. Taken in the Parisian suburbs following the police riots of 2005, the series blends documentary photography conventions with the Western art historical canon, evoking a theatrical yet grounded aesthetic of dissent, with direct references to artists including Jacques-Louis David, Eugène Delacroix and Jeff Wall. La République (2006), for example, presents a tableau of young men on the brink of conflict. They pull and hold one another, forming human chains and employing theatrical gestures and frozen looks reminiscent of the compositional structure of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830). 

On display across several interconnected rooms, ‘Horse Day’ (2013–19) forms the backbone of the show. Inspired by his encounter with the Black community of the Philadelphia-based Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, this project centres on a horse-decorating competition organized by Bourouissa in collaboration with local riders and artists. In Horse Day (2014), a young Black man is photographed riding a horse adorned in white and red ribbons. The work investigates Bourouissa’s desire to challenge traditional portrayals of the cowboy in American cinema, and to reflect on the practice of whitewashing. At Fondazione MAST, a two-screen video installation relates the creation and staging of the competition. Elsewhere, drawings, collages and silver prints of the stables and it’s riders are printed on car body parts and pickup trucks, reflecting the visual and economic texture of Philadelphia’s Rust Belt.

The exhibition reveals the continuous evolution of Bourouissa’s practice, which orients itself toward a process of revision and formal exploration. This is exemplified in ‘Hands’ (2025), a new series comprising 14 UV prints on plexiglass, layered with metal panels and steel bars – symbols of control and constraint. Mounted on a white metal grid, evocative of barriers, fences and cells, the prints combine images from the artist’s archive, collaging close ups of bodily fragments and gestures that evoke a sense of tension and oppression, as can be seen in Hands #21 (2025), where a palm grabs a wrist, evoking both individual and societal coercion.

Themes of control and unease are also addressed in the 19 grainy portraits from the series ‘Shoplifters’ (2014), originally taken with a Polaroid camera by a supermarket manager in Brooklyn, and displayed at the entrance of the shop to shame the alleged thieves. Bourouissa reproduced these snapshots of people posing with their stolen items, recontextualizing their offences by emphasizing the banality of the products taken – eggs, cheese, canned food – denouncing the consumer poverty of society and thus absolving the thieves of their guilt. In doing so, he also subverts the brutality of the systems of power and surveillance.

Inhabiting the uncertain threshold between integration and exclusion, Bourouissa’s staged compositions serve as platforms for visibility, asserting the presence and agency of subcultures, migrants and marginalized people. The images in ‘Communautés’ represent acts of resilience – insistent gestures that linger, charged with a quiet, enduring strength.

Mohamed Bourouissa’s ‘Communautés. Projets 2005–2025’ is on view at Fondazione MAST, Bologna, until 28 September 

_{Main image: Mohamed Bourouissa, Ride Day #2, 2019, silver print on car body parts, print on sublichrome, galvanized steel, rivets, car paint, spray paint, varnish, horse blanket, digital print on horse blanket, horse bit, stirrup and steel frame, 227 × 634 × 67 cm. Courtesy: © Mohamed Bourouissa ADAGP and Mennour, Paris}