Périphérique
Mohamed Bourouissa
Loose Joints
French and English
Texts by Taous R. Dahmani and Clément Chéroux
Softcover
172 Pages
230 x 340 mm
2021
ISBN 9781912719297
In this breakthrough series of photographs, Deutsche Börse award-winner Mohamed Bourouissa chose to appropriate the codes of history painting by staging scenes with his friends and acquaintances in the Paris banlieues where they used to hang out. Confrontations, gatherings, incidents, looks, and frozen gestures all suggest a palpable tension. Invoking Delacroix as much as Jeff Wall, Bourouissa’s high drama in the outskirts of Paris attempts to give a place in French history to individuals usually neglected and overlooked in contemporary society. In Périphérique, Bourouissa uses staging to critique stereotypical representations of these individuals, engaging with and parodying media representations of the banlieues and their inhabitants.
Périphérique was completed from 2005-2008, in the context of unprecedented riots and violence in the French banlieues against social inequality. This landmark publication of the Périphérique series in 2021 will look back on the work’s original context in light of still-prescient social, economic and political issues, through the eyes of two newly-commissioned texts by Taous R. Dahmani and Clément Chéroux. This first publication of the series in full mines Bourouissa’s archives, with more than sixty pages of unseen preparatory photographs that reveal how the artist’s meticulous process of observation, preparation and collaboration with his subjects shaped this unique and bold body of work.
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About the Artist
Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978, Blida, Algeria) MB lives and works in Paris (FR). MB describes contemporary society implicitly, by its contours. With a critical take on the mass media image, the subjects of his photographs and videos are people left behind at the crossroads of integration and exclusion. Preceded by a long immersion phase, each of Mohamed Bourouissa’s projects builds a new enunciation situation.
mohamedbourouissa.com
(source: https://www.mohamedbourouissa.com/projects/)
About the Publisher
Loose Joints is an award-winning independent publishing house based in London, UK and Marseille, France, founded by Sarah Piegay Espenon and Lewis Chaplin in 2014. They collaborate with leading and emerging artists on contemporary approaches to photography in book form. Loose Joints circulates new visual perspectives through a dedicated list seeking to elevate underrepresented voices in photographic discourse.
loosejoints.biz
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