Black Cowboys, Banlieues, and Beyond: Twenty Years of Mohamed Bourouissa

From Paris suburbs to Philadelphia stables, Mohamed Bourouissa interrogates the politics of representation and community in urban peripheries across twenty years of projects

To Be Part of a Community: Black Cowboys in North Philly

Horse Day grew from a long immersion in a Black equestrian community in North Philadelphia. Initially met with distrust, Bourouissa chose participation over extraction: “I didn’t want to arrive, film and disappear. I had to create something that stayed with them.” The result was a public pageant for horses and riders, documented across media.

The riders wear flamboyant costumes; their gestures echo medieval and sci‑fi iconography. Printed on car hoods, their portraits read as both heroic and fragile. The visual language links car culture, horse culture and industrial labour: “These communities are not homogeneous. They cross cultures, histories and imaginaries.”

Horse Day overturns the Western myth of the cowboy as white and solitary: “I saw young men riding horses in the city and knew this needed another narrative—one where they create their own mythologies.” The process generated a film, sculptural works and a performative event: “The real piece isn’t the film. It’s what happened that day—the gathering, the energy. That’s the artwork.”

Beyond the visual, the project shows how communities forge meaning and dignity through ritual: “It was about giving form to what they were already doing—about acknowledging it.”

Minority Identity: the Banlieue as Pictorial Battlefield

The series Périphérique marked Bourouissa’s emergence on the global art scene. Created between 2005 and 2008, it stages choreographed scenes of confrontation and uncertainty set in the Parisian banlieues. Using friends and local residents as non‑professional actors, he constructs images that echo classical painting: compositional triangles, controlled light, layered narratives. “These are not documentary photos. They are constructed images. I sketched the scenes beforehand, directed gestures, controlled the light—like a painter would.” La République, for example, recalls Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple.

The work critiques the Western canon’s exclusions: “There weren’t many images of young Arabs or Black men in the French art history I studied, so I made them. I had to.” A tension arises between the social realism of the settings and the elevated style of representation, rupturing the usual visualisation of marginalised identities: “After the 2005 riots, I wanted to create a narrative that countered how the media showed us—not as threats, but as humans with stories and dignity.”

Each image functions as a tableau vivant: characters lean, reach, clash—evoking resistance, solidarity and surveillance. “I wanted these bodies to occupy the frame as subjects, not as signs of trouble.” Works added in 2022 underscore continuity: “I keep adding to Périphérique. These aren’t frozen moments; they evolve, like the communities they depict.”

Surveillance, Shame and the Right to Need

In Shoplifters, Bourouissa repurposes security photographs from a Brooklyn grocery store. Images meant to shame become monuments of need: “It wasn’t the theft that was violent; it was the act of public exposure.” The stolen goods are basic—cheese, soap, eggs.

“There’s a paradox in photography: it can control and liberate at the same time,” he reflects. Re‑contextualised, the images shift from instruments of surveillance to evidence of structural fragility: “It’s not about these individuals stealing; it’s about what society steals from them—dignity, access, care.” Conscious of ethics, he adds: “I hesitated for years before showing these. I didn’t want to re‑exploit them; I needed to be sure they were speaking back, not simply displayed again.”

The installation exposes how photography sustains moral narratives—and how it can sabotage them: “It’s a sabotage of the system that created the image. I wanted to flip the power dynamic.”

Human Fragility Rendered in Plexiglas

With Hands (2025), Bourouissa turns inward, experimenting with materials. Fragments from earlier works are printed on transparent Plexiglas and fixed to metal grids, evoking systems of order and rupture. Inspired by Antonin Artaud’s line “La grille est un moment terrible pour la sensibilité, la matière,” Hands presents a symbolic collision: “I wanted to show how we are captured—how gestures become evidence. The grid immobilises and reveals.”

Site‑specific interventions on MAST’s windows turn the architecture into a lightbox: “Since 2019, I’ve been thinking about space like music—rhythm, silence, transparency. They let a work breathe.” Viewers glimpse themselves in the Plexiglas, a reminder of shared implication: “This piece isn’t only about others; it’s about us—our gaze, our expectations. We’re the final layer of the image.”

He never closes a project: “I return, revise, reframe. The work evolves with me.” Hands links systemic structures—prisons, grids, screens—with everyday gestures of vulnerability and resilience.

Cultural Life in Industry: Visual Economies and Material Legacies

Fondazione MAST—devoted to technology, art and innovation—offers a fitting context for Bourouissa’s exploration of industrial aesthetics and social function. His materials—car hoods, Plexiglas—echo the site’s focus on manufacturing and labour: “My work uses materials that carry histories: metals, plastics, surfaces that reflect and distort.”

Horse Day’s sculptural elements recall not only car‑tuning culture but also the Fordist legacy of American cities; Shoplifters critiques visual economies that criminalise the poor; Hands engages institutional architecture: “Art should live where people work—not above, not beside, within. That’s why I value spaces like MAST.” Bourouissa extends his relational ethic to the venue itself: “Spaces speak. We have to listen. That, too, is community.”

Refusing the Artist as Outsider

Bourouissa rejects the role of artist as expert. His practice is not reportage but entangled presence: “Sometimes I observe, sometimes I participate. Yet as soon as the camera is on, a distance appears. That distance is necessary—so is proximity.”

His ethic of representation is relational: “I try to respect people. I don’t put them in difficult situations. I ask if they agree. They often bring gestures I didn’t expect; those accidents give the images life.”

While early work carried acute tension, recent images embrace nuance: “Now I want to show tenderness, too—a Muslim family in a park. That’s political in its own way: simply showing people being, outside the stereotype.” Image‑making, he insists, is responsibility: “You can’t pretend to be neutral. Every frame is a choice, every image says something. The question is: are you listening?”

A Vocabulary Beyond Activism

Though engaged with political questions, Bourouissa resists the “committed artist” label: “I don’t define my work as engaged. I just do what I do. If it resonates, fine—but I don’t want to be boxed in.”

His practice encompasses music (“There is always a rhythm, even in silence”), theatre (“A performance is an exchange”) and architecture (“The walls are not neutral; they shape perception”). Identity, for him, is intersectional and mutable: “What interests me isn’t just the image but the conditions that make it possible. Who is allowed to speak? Who is seen? Who remains outside the frame?”

Communautés. Projets 2005–2025: Exhibition Overview

Communautés. Projets 2005–2025 is the most extensive solo exhibition in Italy of the French‑Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa, presented at Fondazione MAST in Bologna. Curated by Francesco Zanot, the show spans twenty years of artistic production and unfolds through four series: Périphérique (2005–2008), Horse Day (2013–2019), Shoplifters (2014) and Hands (2025), the last of which is being shown to the public for the first time.

Born in Blida, Algeria, in 1978 and raised in the suburbs of Paris, Bourouissa belongs to several intersecting communities: the North‑African diaspora, post‑colonial Europe and contemporary art. “I am part of several communities—Algerian, French, artistic,” he tells us. “It’s a matter of interaction.” His work moves fluidly across photography, video, sculpture, drawing, installation and music.

Bourouissa was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet in 2017 and nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2018. He won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2020 and the Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation Photobook Prize in 2022 for his monograph Périphérique. His work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, LACMA, the Centre Pompidou and the Stedelijk Museum. Yet his method remains grounded in the periphery, in collective authorship and in lived tension.

His practice is a sustained investigation into how images shape, and are shaped by, social realities: “Images are not innocent. They carry histories; they are political. When you make an image, you choose whom to include, how to look. That choice matters.” Over the years, his work has challenged conventional ideas of authorship and visibility, treating the exhibition space not only as a place of display but as a site of transformation.

Biography – Mohamed Bourouissa

Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978) is a French‑Algerian visual artist based in Paris. His multidisciplinary practice—spanning photography, video, sculpture, installation and music—explores power, representation and social dynamics. He gained recognition with Périphérique, which stages scenes in Parisian suburbs to challenge stereotypes. His work has been shown internationally at venues such as the Centre Pompidou, the New Museum and the Venice Biennale, and is held in collections including MoMA and the Centre Pompidou. In 2020 he received the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for his exhibition Free Trade at Rencontres d’Arles.