Signal by Mohamed Bourouissa at Palais De Tokyo, Paris

Curated by Hugo Vitrani at Palais De Tokyo, Signal is the first prospective retrospective in a national institution providing a unique chance to explore Mohamed Bourouissa's work from the latest creations to his earliest works.

Overview

The imprisonment of bodies and the restriction of thought, the representation of identities, the determination and the control of language, 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 offers 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. Guest artists are Christelle Oyiri, Ibrahim Meïté Sikely, Neïla Czermak Ichti, Abdelmajid Mehdi, Collectif Hawaf and LILA.

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 Bourouissa now lives and is active as a member of the local community; 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.