Mohamed Bourouissa expands an intimate family history into a broader reflection on memory, migration, and the postcolonial condition.
Mohamed Bourouissa. Pour Noubia spans a wide geographical as well as geopolitical arc around places of biographical significance for the artist: from his aunt Noubia's last home in Osnabrück, Germany, through the suburbs of Paris, where he lives today, to his family's hometown in Blida, Algeria.
Drawing on the format of the photo album, the book breathes life into this layered history. It brings together largely unpublished images and newly commissioned texts that situate both Noubia's life and Bourouissa's practice within broader historical and social contexts.
The project takes its starting point in the photo albums of Bourouissa's aunt, Noubia Meyer, whose images and voice recordings—collected before her death in 2022—form the core of this deeply personal new body of work. When in 2025, on behalf of Marta Herford, curator Oriane Durand invited Bourouissa to put together a major solo exhibition, it became an important step for him to integrate his aunt's story—as Osnabrück is very close to Herford—into this commission. Further developed in a second iteration at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich (June 2026), the project expands an intimate family history into a broader reflection on memory, migration, and the postcolonial condition.
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
