Pour Noubia

Pour Noubia spans a wide geographical as well as geopolitical arc around places of biographical significance for the artist: 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 It brings together largely unpublished images and newly commissioned texts that situate both Noubia’s life and Bourouissa’s practice within broader historical and social contexts.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), the project expands an intimate family history into a broader reflection on memory, migration, and the postcolonial condition.