Mohamed Bourouissa — Temps Mort — Kamel Mennour Gallery — Opening — Slash Paris

Past: Friday, March 7, 2014

Temps mort, a title borrowed from a track by the rapper Booba, is initially the title of a film Mohamed Bourouissa produced in 2009, as part of his studies at the Fresnoy, widely shown in numerous exhibitions and festivals.

In collaboration with the Kamel Mennour gallery, Études Books retraces the little known origin of the project: 21 photographs produced a year earlier, 300 multimedia and text messages exchanged between the artist and his friend Al, an inmate, over a period of eight months.

Mohamed Bourouissa gives different framing and shot instructions to Al, who then takes pictures of his environment in the low resolution of his phone’s camera.

The images are basic, topographical, but their processing reveals the suspension of time that follows the deprivation of outdoor life, that vanished everyday life of “a captive social absentee”, giving them a poetic dimension unlike the journalistic esthetic that they seem to echo at first glance.

Temps mort gathers these 21 images and archives interspersed with a selection of text messages that render Al and Mohamed Bourouissa’s exchanges and their evolving artistic dialogue, through cell phones, the inmate’s only tie with the outside. A few white pages containing only dates, punctuate the publication and emphasize the stretching of time, a highly subjective notion that takes on a whole new sense in imprisonment. Time out.