Nour Bishouty (b. Amman, Jordan) is a Lebanese-Canadian multidisciplinary artist. She works in different media focusing mostly on video, writing, sculpture, and printed matter.[1] Her interdisciplinary work explores notions of permission and articulation in cultural narratives overwritten by dispossession and displacement,[2][3] and explores gaps in archival memory and the Western production of knowledge and fantasy.[4] In her practice, she proposes artistic strategies that unsettle institutional conventions of classification, order, and the production of value.[5][6] Bishouty's work is featured in the 13th Liverpool Biennial curated by Marie-Anne McQuay.[7]
She has exhibited her work at the GTA21 Triennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Manif d'art la Biennale de Quebec; Cooper Cole, Gallery 44, Toronto; SAVAC: South Asian Visual Arts Centre, Toronto; Darat Al Funun, Amman; Casa Arabe, Madrid; the Mosaic Rooms, London; and the Beirut Art Centre, amongst others. Bishouty's work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada's Library and Archives, and the Burnaby Art Gallery.[9] amongst others.
Artistic Career
Bishouty's 2021 book "1—130: Selected Works Ghassan Bishouty b. 1941 Safad, Palestine — d. 2004 Amman, Jordan," revisits the artistic oeuvre and personal archives of her late father, Ghassan Bishouty a Palestinian-Lebanese artist whose work was little known during his lifetime.[10] The book constitutes an improvised study into a collection of artworks and envisions a partly speculative narrative of the late artist's life as an intimate act of commemoration, while at the same time looking into the parameters and complexities of artistic legacy and obscurity.[11] It was co-published by Art Metropole in Toronto and Moto Books in Berlin.
In an essay review by scholar and art historian Tammer El-Sheikh, Bishouty’s work is described as stylistically diverse and compared with Edward's Said’s notion of a “late style”: "from one generation to the next, we have an example of a late style that emerges with the young, on the shoulders of the dead, so late it is posthumous, in fact, but freer in its versatility as a result of having begun anew."[12]
In 2016 she was the inaugural artist in residence at Twenty-three Days at Sea, a traveling artist residency initiated by Access Gallery in Vancouver that took place aboard a freighter ship traveling across the Pacific Ocean[15][16][17] In 2023, she was the Toronto artist in residence at the Ace Hotel in collaboration with Toronto's Images Festival.[18][19][20]