Mohamed Bourouissa: HARa!!!!!!hAaaRAAAAA!!!!!hHAaA!!! | Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark
October 9, 2021 – February 20, 2022
More information on the exhibitionMohamed Bourouissa
HARa!!!!!!hAaaRAAAAA!!!!!hHAaA!!!
Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark
Curated by Henriette Bretton-Meyer
Kunsthal Charlottenborg is pleased to present HARa!!!!!!hAaaRAAAAA!!!!!hHAaA!!!, a solo exhibition with the French-Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa, following a presentation of the exhibition at Goldsmiths CCA in London earlier this year.
Bourouissa engages with contemporary life through photography, film, installation and art history, seeking to humanize his community as social subjects and initiate agency where is it often deprived. Each situation that Bourouissa investigates demands a different artistic approach, dialogue, and ethical negotiation. Born in Algeria and growing up in the banlieue (suburbs) of Paris, the artist brings a specific viewpont—of the street, hip-hop culture, criminality, economics, and survival against structures of power that do not allow sections of the population to access basic rights of education, justice, and democratic citizenship.
Various systems of exchange shape Bourouissa’s works—in the form of his transactions with participants in making the work; his tracing of colonial and cultural histories across disparate geographies; his focus on flows of capital and transformations of value; and not least in showing his work in gallery spaces and as part of the art market, which he takes pleasure in disrupting.
Bourouissa’s early work has often centered on the lives of young people of the banlieue, whose backgrounds run against the rigid nationalism of the French Republique. Later works take a more global scope, finding subjects in Australia and the US and resulting in encounters that reveal different systems of power and routes of exchange. Bourouissa claims no emancipatory role for his work—rather, his practice emerges from an equitable dialogue with specific groups, through a particular place and way of seeing. Marshalling references from Delacroix to hip-hop, Bourouissa’s work productively troubles the dividing line between the museum and the street, minority and majority, and the center and the periphery.
Mohamed Bourouissa lives and works in Paris, France. He has exhibited widely—solo exhibitions include Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, PA; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; and most recently Goldsmiths CCA, London, UK. He has participated in a large number of group exhibitions including the biennials in Sydney, Sharjah, Havana, Lyon, Venice, Algeria, Liverpool, and Berlin. In 2018 he was nominated for the prestigious French art award Le Prix Marcel Duchamp and in 2020 he was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Award. HARa!!!!!!hAaaRAAAAA!!!!!hHAaA!!! is his first solo exhibition in Scandinavia.
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