PARIS.- For his seventh solo exhibition at the gallery, Mohamed Bourouissa presents his film Généalogie de la Violence, shown alongside a recent series of sculptures titled HANDS.
The short film Généalogie de la violence (2024) and the photographic series HANDS (2025) are Mohamed Bourouissa’s most recent works. Through different but complementary languages, both address the themes of the relationship between body and power, the individual and the system, reality and representation. In continuity with a research he has been carrying out consistently for about twenty-five years, in these works Mohamed Bourouissa investigates and reconstructs forms of control and resistance, translating his own personal experience into works charged with tension, suspended between documentary and fiction.
Généalogie de la violence is a multimedia project composed of a film and a series of aluminium sculptures that explore the violence perpetrated by the police as a systemic phenomenon. It manifests not only in physical form, but also through behaviours and the language used, as well as through bureaucratic mechanisms and existing legal frameworks.
The experimental short film begins with a common scene from the everyday life of many racialized individuals: a young man is pulled over by the police for an identity check while in the car with his girlfriend. What initially appears to be a harmless encounter, quickly escalates into a situation of humiliation, violation, and alienation. This opening sequence sets the stage for Mohamed Bourouissa’s exploration of the structural violence that permeates the lives of marginalized communities in the West, revealing the brutality underlying standardized control procedures, which are only seemingly founded on principles of justice and equality. Bourouissa weaves the narrative through a language that is both ambiguous and charged with contrasts. The film is structured around a continuous alternation between live-action scenes and computer-generated sequences that spread across the screen like viruses (the setting itself is reminiscent of a science fiction film, between Alex Proyas’ Dark City, suspended in perpetual night, and Dredd’s Mega-City One, where the only law is administered by cops called “judges”), visually interpreting the psychic dissociation of the protagonist during the search. Reality breaks down under the weight of psychological tension and subjectivity becomes the only ground of resistance. In this intermediate and surreal space, the mind attempts to avoid the oppression of the present, fabricating alternative worlds in which the body escapes the insults of contact and manipulation.
In Généalogie de la violence, there is no brutal outburst of physical aggression. The narrative pathos grows almost imperceptibly, without ever reaching a breaking point. Far from the spectacularized violence (typical of the mass media and cinema), here we witness a more subtle, sneaking, normalized violence. The film works by subtraction: there is no climax, no catharsis, no way out. An atmosphere of constant tension persists, in which injustice is represented not through shock, but through a discreet yet constant oppression. Mohamed Bourouissa invites us to look beyond the surface, recognising a form of violence that has become dangerously banal, even normal, but never acceptable. HANDS (2025) is the next step. With this project, the artist continues his reflection on the fragmentation of the body and the tension between the individual and the institutions. These works consist of photographic images printed on plexiglass, superimposed on metal grids and plates. Coming from previous series, the images are reworked through a process of montage (there is a bit of cinema here, too), recycling and repurposing. Hands, gestures, shreds of bodies are extracted from their original context and reinserted into a new formal and conceptual network.
The result is a constellation of fractured presences that seem constrained in an excessively circumscribed space, trapped between surface and support, visible and invisible.
The choice of using the metal grid as a backdrop does not simply respond to a formal question: it constitutes an architectural device that refers to barriers, fences and cells. It also appears as a reference to conceptual grids that organise knowledge, classify subjects and codify behaviour. Images are superimposed on this structure as fragments of resistance, vital signals that seek to escape the established order.
The HANDS series stands on the edge between photography and installation, oscillating between an archival gesture and a set of evolving, transformative images. The reuse of already existing visual materials is the consequence of a procedural choice and a political statement: nothing is ever definitive, not even the image. Every representation can be reworked and recontextualised. Through this ongoing process of transformation, the artist appears to challenge the very notion of a fixed identity or image, proposing instead a vision of reality that is unstable, multiple, and constantly shifting.
The reference to Antonin Artaud—made explicit in a phrase that inspired the entire series: “La grille est un moment terrible pour la sensibilité, la matière” [The grid is a terrible moment for sensitivity and matter]—echoes the “Theatre of Cruelty”, in which the stage is a space of conflict and confrontation. As for Artaud, for Mohamed Bourouissa the grid is a physical and spiritual trauma. It is the medium that connects the sensible with the inorganic: it immobilises what is alive. And it is precisely against this immobilisation that HANDS sets out, replacing the purely documentary function generally associated with photography, particularly when addressing social issues, with a constant flow of alternative narratives and interpretations. Mohamed Bourouissa does not simply archive, but rather interrogates.He does not simply criticise, but puts a whole system into crisis. His work has the ability to push images beyond their representative function, transforming them into objects of struggle, reflection and opposition.
— Francesco Zanot
