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Osnabrück. Photographic archive of Noubia Meyer
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The publication Mohamed Bourouissa – Pour Noubia spans a wide geographical as well as geopolitical arc around places of biographical significance for artist Mohamed Bourouissa: from his aunt Noubia’s last home in Osnabrück, Germany, through the suburbs of Paris, where he lives today, to his family’s hometown in Blida, Algeria. Drawing on the format of the photo album, the book breathes life into this layered history. It brings together largely unpublished images and newly commissioned texts that situate both Noubia’s life and Bourouissa’s practice within broader historical and social contexts.
The project takes its starting point in the photo albums of Bourouissa’s aunt, Noubia Meyer, whose images and voice recordings—collected before her death in 2022—form the core of this deeply personal new body of work. When in 2025, on behalf of Marta Herford, curator Oriane Durand invited Bourouissa to put together a major solo exhibition, it became an important step for him to integrate his aunt’s story—as Osnabrück is very close to Herford—into this commission. Further developed in a second iteration at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich (June 2026, curated by Yasmin Naderi Afschar), the project expands an intimate family history into a broader reflection on memory, migration, and the postcolonial condition.
Published in collaboration with Marta Herford and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, the book features texts by Yasmin Naderi Afschar, Oriane Durand, Kathleen Rahn, and Marie Robin.
Read below an excerpt from Durand’s Noubia: Memory and Artificial Intelligence as featured in the volume.
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Noubia, 2025, Le grand bain, 2025, exhibition view Mohamed Bourouissa - Pour Noubia, Marta Herford, 2025, Collection Marta, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026, Marta Herford, photo: Hans Schröder
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Noubia: Memory and Artificial Intelligence
by Oriane Durand
Mohamed Bourouissa’s video installation Noubia (2025) is closely linked to Museum Marta Herford geographically. At first glance, there is nothing to suggest this locale as an anchor point for such an intimate work. However, on his first visit to Herford, Bourouissa realized that the museum is only about ten minutes by train from Bielefeld, where his aunt Noubia, who died in 2022, is buried. As one of the most formative figures in Bourouissa’s life, Noubia was a constant presence and an important emotional touchstone. From childhood, the artist would visit her regularly in Osnabrück, the city in which she spent the last thirty years of her life working and building a life for herself. The unique trajectory of Noubia’s life, the strength of her character, and the intensity of the bond between the artist and his aunt led Bourouissa to conceive a work as an homage that would hold the memory of Noubia at its center. Carried by Noubia’s voice, recorded shortly before her death, and accompanied by a series of photographs documenting her life, the film offers up an account that is both personal testimony and political statement. By using artificial intelligence as a tool to transform the archived image, Bourouissa invites reflection on memory as a sensory, embodied experience while at the same time addressing grief as the active and tender continuation of remembrance into the present.
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1991, 2025, exhibition view Mohamed Bourouissa - Pour Noubia, Marta Herford, 2025, Courtesy of the artist, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026, Marta Herford, photo: Hans Schröder
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Noubia was born in 1942 in Blida, Algeria, the eldest of fifteen children. The daughter of an Algerian soldier in the French Army and a housewife, she was forced into marriage at the age of fourteen; rejecting the arranged marriage, she escaped to her grandparents. From the mid-1950s, during the Algerian War (1954–1962), she began working as a sex worker, using the earnings to support her family. Initially, she worked for a Bordel Militaire de Campagne (BMC) attached to a French army barracks, and later in a brothel in Blida run by a French woman. In the early 1960s, she participated in delivering weapons to the mujahideen. She survived a brutal act of violence when Harkis, Algerian auxiliaries allied with the French, nearly beat her to death. The trauma would shape her life thereafter, and in the years following independence, Noubia decided to leave Algeria. After several unsuccessful attempts, she eventually reached France in the early 1970s with the help of the Algerian actor Hadj Abderrahmane.[1] Only a few weeks after her arrival in Paris, she travelled on to Belgium, where she stayed for six months before moving to Germany. She initially settled in Bielefeld, and later in Osnabrück, where she worked in a brothel and later as a dominatrix. She married Erich, a German man, with whom she lived for several years before they separated.
CONTINUE READING
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Le murmure des fantômes, 2018-2025, Blida, 2007-2008, exhibition view Mohamed Bourouissa, Pour Noubia, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2026. © Mohamed Bourouissa, ADAGP, 2026. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Studio Stucky.
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[1] Hadj Abderrahmane (1941–1981), better known by his stage name Inspector Tahar, was a legendary actor of Algerian cinema. As the central figure in a parodic crime saga that began in the late 1960s with the film L’inspecteur mène l’enquête [The Inspector Investigates], he played a sly but naïve police officer who, together with his sidekick L’Apprenti (Yahia Benmabrouk), became a cult duo.
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