Genealogy of Violence (2024) begins with an everyday situation familiar to many racialized individuals: a police officer arbitrarily stops a young man for an identity check. What initially appears to be a harmless encounter quickly escalates into a power struggle tinged with humiliation.
The work explores the relationship between body and power, individual and system, as well as reality and representation. It is an inquiry into the structural violence that permeates the lives of marginalized communities, exposing the normalized injustices that lurk behind standardized police procedures. The violence depicted in the film is not cinematic spectacle but creeping, silent violence that manifests through behavior, language, and societal mechanisms alike.
Genealogy of Violence does not offer catharsis or a satisfying resolution. Constructed in a dreamlike manner, the narrative carries the viewer on a multi-sensory journey intended to convey the intimate feelings that everyday racism can evoke and the traces that systematic oppression can leave on both body and mind. The protagonist’s psychological dissociation is rendered through voices, gestures, silences, and tensions, as the narration shifts between carefully choreographed scenes and digitally generated visualizations. As reality fractures under psychological strain, subjectivity becomes the only ground for resistance; in this surreal state, the mind seeks to escape the present and create alternative worlds where the body can evade touch and violation.
Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978, Algeria) is an artist based in Paris, known for his critical approach to media stereotypes and social structures. His work often focuses on people living at the margins of society, at the intersection of integration and exclusion. Recently, Bourouissa has investigated and reconstructed forms of surveillance and resistance, translating his own personal experience into works charged with tension, suspended between documentary and fiction. His photographs, video works, and sculptures have been widely exhibited and are included in the collections of institutions such as MoMA and the Centre Pompidou. His practice has also been recognized with several major awards and distinctions.s and distinctions.
The exhibition is supported by the Finnish Heritage Agency.
