Bearers of Images and Legends: Mohamed Bourouissa’s Filmic Intercessors

A defining movement of contemporary art in the 2000s, relational art, as formulated by Nicolas Bourriaud in his essay Relational Aesthetics, has left its mark on our consciousness by integrating the spectator into the artistic process. Largely criticized today for its apoliticism and elitism, relational art has laid the foundation, nonetheless, for a practice that made site-specific relationships into material for works of art. A decade later, one sees the emergence of artists who, while investing themselves in this artistic “tradition,” conceive of relations with the other differently, outside the domain of the museum, even outside any “memory of the relationship,” which had until Bourriaud consisted of upholding traces of the “experience of the social relationship.” Mohamed Bourouissa, an emerging figure in French contemporary art, is a perfect example of this trend. Bourouissa seems to be developing a new paradigm of relational art, in which the rapport with the other is not an end in itself, but a means for setting up a filmic and photographic device. In this respect, one video of his is especially characteristic; taking as its subject the trafficking of contraband cigarettes, it focuses on relationships generated through commerce.

Légende (2010)

Barbès-Rochechouart metro station, 18th arrondissement, Paris. In the passageway, street sellers repeatedly and hastily chant “Légende, Légende, Légende!” referring to American Legend cigarettes which they are peddling to passersby. The refrain, familiar to the station’s regular commuters, traverses Bourouissa’s latest video and lends it its title. Filmed using spy cams placed at chest level on several of the peddlers, Légende exclusively presents their point of view. Borrowing his aesthetic from televised news media rhetoric, which tends to report illegal activity through the lens of hidden cameras strapped to journalists, the artist adopts the same surveillance techniques, the same confused, jittery images, while shifting the perspective: here, the supply is filming the demand.