Artist's book based on the eponymous work by Franco-Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa, a series of photographs and a video made with the help of a prisoner from the jail in which he is held, an exchange via SMS and MMS using a mobile phone smuggled into the prison establishment.
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.
This book retraces the lesser-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.
Born 1978 in Blida, Algeria, Mohamed Bourouissa lives and
works in Paris. He studied
photography at the
École Nationale Supérieure
des Arts Décoratifs (Ensad) and in 2007 was awarded the Voies Off prize in
Arles for his series, “Périphériques”.
His work has since been shown in numerous solo and collective exhibitions
in France and across the world: at the Centre Pompidou (Hors Pistes
Festival in 2013), the Musée d'art Moderne of Paris, the
Palais de Tokyo,
the Palazzo Grassi – François Pinault Foundation in Venice, at AGO in
Toronto, the Saatchi Gallery in London, the Dublin Gallery of Photography,
the Museum of Modern Art of Istanbul, the Beirut Exhibition Center,
the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, the MAXXI in Rome, the New
Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of
Art, the SCAD of Atlanta, the Finnish Museum of Photography of Helsinki,
the Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, the Nikolaj Kunsthal of Copenhagen,
the KW Institute for Contemporary Art of Berlin as well as at the Berlin
Biennale, and the 54th Venice Biennale
Text by Magali Jauffret.
Published with Études Books.
published in March 2014
bilingual edition (English / French)
23,5 x 32 cm (hardcover, cloth binding)
144 pages (ill.)
ISBN : 978-2-36962-001-3
EAN : 9782369620013
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