ZURICH.- Mohamed Bourouissa is a portraitist of our time – storyteller and inventor in one. At the heart of his works are people. Not those on whom the spotlight of media, politics, art and history shines in any case, rather those ‘next door’; those people whose life-stories tell of exclusion, of invisibility, but also of resistance. These are the lives for which Bourouissa makes room in his works.
In his first solo exhibition in Switzerland, Bourouissa invites the audience on a journey, from Blida in Algeria, where he was born, via the Parisian suburbs, where he now lives, to Osnabrück in Germany, where the eventful life of his aunt Noubia Meyer drew to a close. Films, objects, AI animations and photographs form the stops along the way, set within immersive spatial experiences.
The exhibition begins in Blida, a city in northern Algeria. Not only does Mohamed Bourouissa’s family come from here, but another name is also closely associated with this city, Frantz Fanon. The Martinique-born physician, political philosopher and anti-colonial activist ran the local hospital’s psychiatric ward from 1953 until late 1956. At the clinic, he studied among other things the correlation between racism, colonial power structures and mental health. Bourouissa visited the clinic during his stay in Blida in 2008 to take photographs there. Along with the clinic’s patients, his photographs in the series Blida (2007–2008) depict life in the city, its residents, and members of Bourouissa’s family, such as his aunt Nassera. Her portrait is the largest in the series – a reflection of her importance for the community. With a calm expression on her face, she watches over events unfolding in Blida and, through the photograph, those in the exhibition space, too. The square format of the images creates an intimacy that conveys in full the personality of the person portrayed, while at the same time revealing the least possible information about them.
In the video installation Le murmure des fantômes (2018–2025), Bourouissa continues his engagement with Fanon and the clinic by portraying a long-time patient, Bourlem Mohamed. Mohamed discusses with Bourouissa the hospital’s healing methods under Fanon’s leadership. He tells of violence he experienced, but also of botany and the creation of a garden as a form of therapy. The wooden structure in the exhibition space, in which the 6-channel video work is shown, is based on the floor plan of the clinic in Blida. It translates the spatial conditions into our immediate surroundings, making it a symbol of both control and being-controlled.
Paris is the location of the works in the second exhibition room. Bourouissa’s best-known group of works, Périphérique, is represented here by earlier photographs, but also includes a rarely shown new edition of the series. These pictures are often derived from historical works of art, from which Bourouissa recreates scenes in photographic form. However, he replaces the typical protagonists of classical history painting:
‘I’m interested in plurality – and in the image I can be pragmatic. The Arab community was not visible in France; I wanted to represent the people I saw around myself, the people who were doing the same graffiti as me, listening to the same music as me. Photography gave me that.’ — Mohamed Bourouissa in British Journal of Photography, September 2025
The more recent works were created mainly in Gennevilliers, a town in the north-western suburbs of Paris in which Bourouissa lives and works – along with many Maghreb and Muslim communities. Implicit stereotyping of Muslim women is a theme that Bourouissa engages with in several pictures. In Alyssia, for example, a young woman poses for a selfie. Bourouissa developed the setting in collaboration with Alyssia; while partly a deliberately exaggerated staging that reflects the artificiality and constructed nature of selfie culture, it is also a freely chosen form of representation featuring enigmatic, defiant details in the background. These create uncertainty about how we should interpret the images, thus challenging preconceived notions of seeing.
In the film Généalogie de la violence (2024), Bourouissa uses 3D-animated sequences to create powerful images that capture the emotional life of a young man who is stopped by the police for no reason – images that convey his feelings of speechlessness, shame, humiliation and suffering. Bourouissa reveals how a moment of invisible, structural violence becomes etched into individual memory.
Through works like these, Bourouissa places himself in the service of representing those who are othered, under-represented or misrepresented. He does not speak about or on behalf of his protagonists, but – in the words of theorist and film-maker Trinh T. Minh-ha – he ‘speaks nearby’.
On the upper floor, the journey finally comes to a halt in Osnabrück. Noubia Meyer, Bourouissa’s aunt, serves as the starting point for the works on display here. They have all been created for this exhibition, which was on view at the Museum Marta Herford until January 2026.
Likewise born in Blida, Noubia Meyer left Algeria as a young woman and, following a series of detours, settled in Osnabrück, Germany. Having worked in the sex industry since her youth, she later became self-employed in this field. The aunt and her nephew shared a fascination with photography. Noubia’s life, extraordinary in many ways, is therefore extensively recorded in photographs. Before her death in 2022, she left Bourouissa her comprehensive photographic archive with the request to preserve it.
Since then, the artist has been working with this material, which is unique both in the artistic and the historical sense: the daily lives of sex workers in the French brothels of Algeria, as well as in the European sex industry during the post-war decades, have scarcely been documented – and certainly not from the perspective of a sex worker.
In the video work titled Noubia (2025), she tells her story. In a calm, assured voice, she speaks about key milestones in her life and breaks the taboos surrounding her work. Photographs from her archive serve as accompaniment to her voice. Snapshots taken in Algeria, with family members in Germany, or from her everyday life reveal the realities of the world she inhabited. Through the use of AI, Bourouissa sets these photographs in motion: the figures come to life for a moment in an unstable, liminal state located between photography and film. At the same time, errors and distortions create something fragile, disconcerting.
The video, projected onto a curtain, forms part of an immersive spatial installation. We walk on gravel rather than on the familiar museum floor. The crunching of our footsteps links both symbolically and acoustically our route through the exhibition with places outside the museum: with cemeteries, parks or footpaths. Noubia Meyer’s story is thus metaphorically conveyed to the outside world. Sculptural works form further anchor points on the gravel, spatially extending the work of remembrance depicted in the film. They function as a memento mori – as a reminder of the transient nature of existence.
An oversized aluminium tooth afflicted with caries refers to the broader geopolitical context of Noubia’s life-story and the aftermath of French colonial rule in Algeria. With French colonisation, food in Algeria became much higher in sugar. However, the rise in tooth decay could not be treated properly, something Bourouissa marks with the striking image of the tooth. Finally, in a series of lightboxes, Bourouissa turns his attention to his aunt’s friends and companions. Using AI, he alters their portraits to protect their identities, yet still stakes out a place for them in the collective visual memory.
It may be a coincidence that one of the greatest anti-colonial thinkers of our time, Frantz Fanon, worked in Bourouissa’s home town. Yet this chance element illustrates a fundamental aspect of Bourouissa’s work: he always sees the personal and the intimate as an integral expression of broader social and political contexts. The works in the exhibition are all based on lived experiences – the artist’s own or those of people close to him: friends and acquaintances in the Parisian banlieues, the Maghreb communities in Gennevilliers, the long-term patient at the psychiatric clinic in Blida, and members of his family. Pour Noubia pays tribute to them all.
