These striking photos expose the hidden systems that shape our lives

The 2024 short film Généalogie de la violence, a haunting take on the unspoken brutality and humiliation of a “random” police stop, was a turning point in the career of its French-Algerian creator, Mohamed Bourouissa. “That experience changed how I look at my own work,” he tells Dazed. As a result, he felt the need to return to “past gestures” from his 20-year career as a photographer, and shine a light on them in new ways. 

“We’re in a moment where artistic languages are being redefined, where the dominance of screens is transforming our relationship to images, to time, to storytelling,” he adds. “Reconsidering my work in this context is a way to engage with that shift, to see how a piece can still speak differently, move, and take on a new form.”

The result of this reflective period is on full display in Bourouissa’s new exhibition at Fondazione MAST in Bologna, where several bodies of work – dating back to 2005 – sit alongside each other. “[It’s] not a retrospective in the traditional sense, but rather a weaving of narratives that speak to each other,” the artist says. African American cowboys from the Philadelphia-based Horse Day sit alongside supermarket shoplifters and restaged riots from the breakout photo series Périphérique (2005-2008). Many of these images are also remixed in a new series titled HANDS (2025), where they’re fragmented and reframed against a cold metal grid.

There are a few recurring themes throughout Bourouissa’s work: the kind of individuals and identities that go unseen in contemporary societies, the experience of minorities, how different forms of storytelling can unlock new modes of expression, and how art can expose tensions between the personal and the political. Needless to say, these conversations are as vital and timely as ever in 2025.

On a more personal level, conflicts and complexities have also arisen in Bourouissa’s practice itself over the years. “I think those tensions are always present, and they shift with me,” he explains. “My perspective changes, my methods evolve, but I’m still driven by a desire to make visible certain realities that are often left on the margins, and to question the systems that shape our lives.”

Below, we hear more from Mohamed Bourouissa following the opening of his show at Fondazione MAST.

First of all, can you tell us about the main impulse behind this exhibition, which brings together several series of works?

Mohamed Bourouissa: The initial impulse came from [curator] Francesco Zanot. He wanted to bring together several series to create an overarching perspective... What I found interesting was his desire to highlight aspects of my work that go beyond a purely political reading, although that is certainly present, to open up a reflection on community, on shared gestures, connections, and forms of solidarity.

It’s not only about confronting or exposing, but also about showing collective dynamics, forms of organisation and transmission. What matters to me is allowing individuals to emerge within something that is both collective and singular, showing how identities can exist together, not by being erased or diluted, but by being revealed through being brought together.

What matters to me is... showing how identities can exist together, not by being erased or diluted, but by being revealed through being brought together

Did any recurring themes emerge for you while reorganising the works?

Mohamed Bourouissa: As I brought these series together, I realised that certain obsessions kept resurfacing, particularly the question of representation, invisibility, and collective narration. There’s also a constant tension between documentary and fiction, between the personal and the political.

Each body of work, in its own way, engages with minorities, whether in the United States or in France. There’s a desire to make visible certain social and cultural realities, and to question how these minority identities can find their own forms of expression outside dominant narratives. I also try to explore other types of stories and propose new ways of looking [as] a way of shifting our point of view, transforming the way we see in order to better understand what surrounds us.

What inspired the revisiting and recontextualisation of past works in HANDS? And what does this project say about this stage in your artistic career?

Mohamed Bourouissa: HANDS is a recent series that marks a new form in my practice. It has roots in the work I started with the car hoods in the Horse Day project, but here, everything is more contained, more restrained. It’s no longer about working with massive or monumental objects, but moving toward something more pared-down.

It’s a work about the body and movement – gestures captured, almost stolen, that become a kind of sensitive material. These bodily forms are set against more rigid structures, grids, which are read through layers of transparency. The tension emerges from the confrontation between these two elements: on one side, something alive and fragile, and on the other, a fixed, almost cold structure. The gaze moves between layers, between the organic and the constructed, the visible and the hidden.

Mohamed Bourouissa’s Communautés, Projets 2005-2025 is on show at Fondazione MAST until September 28, 2025.