Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978, AL/FR) is an artist whose practice highlights territories that our societies prefer to forget. Each of his projects require a long period of immersion in order to builds a new narrative framework. Unlike the simplistic narratives prevalent in mainstream media, the artist emphasises complexity in his  representations. “Bourouissa’s work,” Carlos Basualdo explains, “focuses on situations that are always related to the emergence of a configuration of economic and political forces at specific moments in contemporary history, when certain subjects are threatened and their agency is under attack. Although explicitly critical of humanism in its Western, colonial version, Bourouissa’s work is always an attempt to restitute agency to those resilient subjects, to provide them with a sense of dignity.”

Mohamed Bourouissa, HARA!!!!!!hAAARAAAAA!!!!!hHARAAA!!!, 2020
Sound piece
Voices : Abdel, Chems, Djamel, Mounir, Skandre
Sound recording and editing: Jean-Baptiste Imbert
Musical composition: Phantomlove
Audio installation: Gaétan Parseihian
Text: Guillaume Lasserre
Commissioned by Manifesta 13 Marseille
Supported by Drosos Foundation
Courtesy of the artist Kamel Mennour and blum&poe

The expressions ‘hara’ and ‘aouin’, which are very popular in Marseille, come from lookouts posted around places where drugs are sold. They chant these words to warn of the police’s arrival, thus preventing drug dealers from being arrested. For Manifesta 13 Marseille, Mohamed Bourouissa takes these almost incantatory slogans and twists them further into a sound piece that is simultaneously poetic and political. Transformed and distorted to the point of unintelligibility, the phrases become abstract; they become something else that mixes the aesthetic form of rap with the concept of concrete poetry. A monotonous chant, a bird song that must be understood as an alarm. Given the climate of hypersurveillance that goes along with the violence prevalent in contemporary societies, the artist has reversed the codes here to turn the lookouts’ signals into a symptomatic cry of awareness. Stretched to the extreme, the words become simple, outstandingly minimal sounds. Repeated like a mantra, they produce a trance-like evocation of an ancestral ritual.

Mohamed Bourouissa’s sound piece can be understood as the perfect adaptation of Munch’s Scream, whose main figure stares at the viewer in terror. Seemingly shocked, his gaze shakes viewers awake. Bourouissa takes the Norwegian painter’s emblem of tortured expressionism and relates it to the contemporary figure of the whistleblower. The sound waves – laments that have become refrains – echo an expression that fills Marseille’s neighbourhoods, where any number of voices can be heard sounding the alarm. With immeasurable sensitivity, Mohamed Bourouissa invites us to become aware of the world exactly as it is.

* Work conceived for the occasion of Manifesta 13 Marseille

http://www.mohamedbourouissa.com/