Boris Achour spent a year of preparation in a private art school in Paris before joining the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Cergy-Pontoise. After being awarded his diploma in, he continued his post-graduate studies at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Working with photographs, installations, sculptures, videos, slide shows, leaflets, performances and posters, Boris Achour has never chosen to restrict his work to a single medium. However, this variety does reveal a predilection for the object, something that you can take home with you. With Générique, his personal exhibition in April 2000, he uses objects that he has produced (photographs, panel of luminous diodes) to decorate the stage-set of a sit-com, which is reconstructed inside the Chez Valentin gallery. Boris Achour uses each piece as a decorative element, testing its capacity to be extracted from its museum context to live in an everyday environment.

And although from different genres, each object has something in common with the others; they are made with "own means". The most important thing is not the final, plastic result, but the capacity to exist with the means of production offered. This is very much in phase with Robert Filliou's classification of "well done, badly done and not done".

Boris Achour tracks down linguistic slips, displaced meanings and the linguistic aberrations that produce a new meaning. In short, he is interested in the psychological dimension of language, the dimension that makes us look for "who is speaking when I speak". For the exhibition, Sensitive, at the Printemps de Cahors in June 2000, he produced mmmmmm, a sound piece lasting around half an hour. During this time, an aphasic – a person who has lost the sense of communication after an accident – recounts various episodes from his life, especially the process of re-learning language.

Boris Achour borrows slogans from advertising terminology. His piece, Je ne veux tout, made using luminous diodes on a panel, diverts this demand for clarity in information.

The use of paradox also allows him bring out the weaknesses of a system where utility is never called into question. Boris Achour produces sofas that cannot be sat upon and the video image of a hand filled with plaster, which cannot apprehend anything more.

Boris Achour cultivates a lucid defiance towards a "society of communication" and systems. He renounces any radical position-taking and the fatuity of believing in a possible denunciation of society. The artist's role is no longer to be a Shaman, but to have an open ear and point things out; artists point out more than they reveal.

This critical position may seem to have something of a distant echo of Guy Debord's position. Yet the situationist revolution hasn't yet happened and, for Boris Achour, it never will. In place of a romantic retreat from the world comes a type of resistance without affectation. Between 1993 and 1997 the Actions-peu are a "soft guerrilla movement" – gentler modifications of the urban space that are looking for a way of giving a new organisation to reality. These anonymous actions don't aim to create conflict by affirming the aspect of 'more', but rather infiltration by the 'less'.

Terms often used by Boris Achour, Dedans et Dehors (Inside and Outside) – the title of his exhibition at the Centre d'art in Montbéliard – perfectly resume his desire to be in the world, with the artist being neither cursed figure nor hero, and to keep this position of informed observer of the flow of signs and meanings across it. He has given this desire concrete form and, in January 1999, participated in the creation of Public>, a locus for exhibition and experimentation that brings together plastic art, performance, music, dance, etc.

Laetitia Rouiller