MOHAMED BOUROUISSA – TEMPS MORT

An artist’s book based on the French-Algerian artist’s work of the same name, a photo series and a video made with the collaboration of an inmate from the penitentiary where he is incarcerated, via SMS and MMS, thanks to a mobile phone smuggled into the prison.
Temps Mort, whose title is borrowed from a song by rapper Booba, is first and foremost the name of a film directed by Mohamed Bourouissa in 2009, during his studies in Le Fresnoy, which has been widely screened at numerous exhibitions and festivals.
The book traces the lesser-known genesis of the project: 21 photographs taken a year earlier, 300 SMS and MMS exchanged between the artist and Al, a prisoner friend, all over the course of eight months. Mohamed Bourouissa gives various framing instructions to Al, who photographs his environment in the low resolution that his mobile phone allows.
The images are essential, topographical, but their treatment reveals the suspension of time that occurs when one is deprived of external life, the evaded daily life of ‘this imprisoned social absentee’, giving them a poetry that distances them from journalistic aesthetics. They appear to be, at first glance, a reflection of sorts.
Temps Mort brings together these 21 images and archives, interspersed with a selection of text messages tracing the exchanges between Al and Mohamed Bourouissa and the evolution of their artistic dialogue via the mobile phone, the prisoners’ only link with the outside . A few blank pages, on which only a date appears, punctuate the work and emphasise the lengthening of time, this highly subjective notion that takes on new meaning in imprisonment. Time’s up.