"Shoplifters" Series

- Photography (Photography)

32 x 32 cm each

Mohamed Bourouissa

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Mohamed Bourouissa’s “ Shoplifters” Series was created in 2014-2015, in a neighborhood supermarket in Lefferts Garden, Brooklyn. The store manager used to take and display Polaroids of thieves caught in the act. In the tradition of appropriation artists –from Marcel Duchamp to Richard Prince– Bourouissa simply reproduced these photographs and transposed them into the field of art to foster questioning. What interests him in these images, is not only the violence of the manager’s gesture that uses photography as an act of marking and denouncing, but also the essential and daily nature of the stolen objects – eggs, fruits, milk – associated with the distress of the faces. For Bourouissa, these images are documents that denounce the extreme poverty of the neighborhood rather than the thieves themselves.

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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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Colors:

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• moral.a.01
• marginalization.n.01
• class_struggle.n.01
• larceny.n.01
• poverty.n.01