Dave

2018 - Installation (Installation)

160 x 300 x 70 cm

Mohamed Bourouissa

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Dave is part of Mohamed Bourouissa’s project Horse Day , which stemmed from a residency the artist conducted in Philadelphia in 2014. There, he discovered the activities of the Fletcher Street Riding Club, a historical stable and training program built by and aimed at young African Americans. Weaving together two predominant symbols of American lifestyle and culture—the cowboy and the car—Bourouissa collaborated with local riders and artists to organize a contest celebrating the best adorned horse, in the manner of car tuning competitions. The event led to the creation of a film, a series of drawings, and sculptures such as Dave , which are composed of the artist’s photographs of the Black riders silkscreened directly on the fragmented hood of a car. Mimicking the distorted representation of reality as experienced through a car window, the dented aspect of the car’s body is reminiscent of the manner images can be warped. The disjointed pieces of the car point out to holes in History, such as the omission of the existence and tradition of Black cowboys from the meta-narrative and founding myths of the American nation.

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Mohamed Bourouissa became known in the 2000s with a series of photographs on young people in the suburbs of Paris. His work later evolved into video, sculpture, and installation, but remained focused on issues related to immigration and the social-economic processes that lead to integration or exclusion. He describes contemporary society implicitly, by outlining 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.

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