Fouad
Bouchoucha

Studio: Ateliers de la Ville
19 boulevard Boisson
Fr-13004 Marseille

BIOGRAPHY

Fouad Bouchoucha is a sculptor, performer and filmmaker. He is represented by the Eric Dupont gallery, Paris.

After graduating from the Superior School of Fine Arts of Marseille (ESADMM), he joined the post-graduate course at the National School of Fine Arts of Lyon in 2010.

In 2012, for the official opening of Palais de Tokyo (Paris), he presented the installation Air de Jeu on the art centre’s rooftop: nine foghorns blowing out a volume of air equivalent to that of one of Palais de Tokyo’s inaccessible rooms. With this piece, Bouchoucha questioned relations between space and sound. He pushed his system to its breaking point, as he had previously done in 2009 by exploring the air pressure generated by car sound systems.

In 2013, for the re-opening of Marseille’s FRAC (Regional Fund for Contemporary Art), Bouchoucha presented Le Grand Potlatch, a performative installation for which then Secretary of Culture Aurélie Filippetti was invited to light up a fuse connected to 200,000 red firecrackers. On the same year, he was the first artist to take part in an artist residency programme launched by association Sextant et plus in the medina of Tétouan in Morocco.

His work is currently featured in group show HIP-HOP, From the Bronx to the Arab Streets (“HIP-HOP, du Bronx aux rues arabes”) at Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), and will be shown at the Yoko Uhoda gallery in Liege (Belgium) in September 2015.

Born in 1981

Lives and works in Marseille

.

Listen!

Fouad Bouchoucha listens to the world. And not just metaphorically: for this artist listening, in the most physical sense, involves intensity of sound (the thousands of firecrackers of Grand Potlatch), a physical relationship with expelled air (the foghorns of Aire de Jeu [Playground]), and the calling up of enveloping memory images when the sounds aren’t rooted in a definite source – given that fog makes space more tactile than distinct (Paysages topographiques [Topographical Landscapes]). Listening is also, for this visual artist, the optical transmission of sounds that take extreme forms: the sculpture 20,000 htz, for example, expresses “a piercing, all but inaudible sound”.

In the metaphorical sense listening to the world means hooking into the zeitgeist, the nebula of forces guiding our present along those waves emanating (necessarily) from the past. If the artist has a social role, it is certainly that of bringing out of the nebula the structures which, unnoticed by us, direct our lives. Under the Coca-Cola logo . . . the code of the devil. In this respect Nature Morte (Still Life) is a manifesto: it displays the codes (and modes) of the technology that governs the colouration of our everyday environment, to the point where even our perception of a natural bunch of flowers seems strange. Similarly the series La forme des possibles (The Shape of Possibilities) offers drawings of 7 computer screens open on the home pages of 7 industrial programs: all different, but all ready to use their minimal vectors to transcribe our 3 dimensions as objects and arrangements that invade our biotope: architecture, transport, consumer goods, etc.; in other words, stuff whose daily use activates the productivist transformation of the world.

Sylvie Coëllier

 

 

Pression acoustique, essai n°1, 2008

Car, cement
250 x 150 x 150 cm
Courtesy galerie Eric Dupont, Paris

Vingt mille Hertz, 2012

Steel
178 x 65 x 65 cm
Numbered edition 1/3 + 2 E.A
Courtesy Eric Dupont gallery, Paris

XYZ, 2012

Mixed media
170 x 170 x 170 cm
Numbered edition 1/3 + 2 E.A.
Courtesy Eric Dupont gallery, Paris

Ronnie Coleman, 2012

Leg press
1 200 kg of iron
200 x 300 x 100 cm
Courtesy Eric Dupont gallery, Paris

Nature morte, 2012

Wood, metal, charts, 6000 Kelvin fluorescent light, flowers
180 x 150 x 62 cm
Courtesy Eric Dupont gallery, Paris

Goodbye Horses, 2011

Glass fibre, carbon 3M, Bugatti Veyron
Co-production with Rendez-vous 11
Shot from the exhibition Rendez-vous 11
Courtesy Eric Dupont gallery, Paris