“A Gathering Place for Objects That Have No Place”: Nour Bishouty's 1-130

An interview with artist Nour Bishouty about reconstructing her late father’s art practice in her book 1-130, for the Journal of Visual Culture’s Palestine Portfolio

Excerpt

“An object is a construction of the mind, sometimes with physical extensions,” writes Nour Bishouty in her artist book 1–130: Selected works Ghassan Bishouty b. 1941 Safad, Palestine – d. 2004 Amman, Jordan (2020). It could be the self-reflexive aphorism of a conceptually minded artist, or a diasporic meditation on loss — or, in Bishouty’s case, both. In 1–130, the Toronto-based artist evokes a constellation of absent objects, places, and people related to her late father, Ghassan Bishouty, a little-known artist who lived in Lebanon and Jordan after being displaced from Palestine in 1948. (The book’s title enumerates the paintings, drawings, and sculptures selected and photographed by Nour.) 1–130 serves as an archive for an artist whose life was uprooted twice, by the Palestinian nakba and the Lebanese civil war, a reparative gesture of gathering in one place the pieces of a life scattered.

         Achille Mbembe (2002, 22) has characterized the archive, ambivalently, as a “struggle against the fragments of life being dispersed.” In the context of state archives, and museums rooted in colonialism, such centralization subdues unauthorized histories and unruly memories. But amid the ongoing deracination of Palestinian life, assembling errant objects restores continuity to personal and communal identity. By gathering her father’s art, using certain recognized archival procedures, Bishouty lends it a degree of visibility and order. At the same time, she unsettles museological conventions and permeates her father’s artworks and ephemera with her own acts of collage, ekphrasis, and storytelling. Her book obliquely reconstructs her father’s work — and her relationship to it — through an array of forms and media, narrating his life in lists, anecdotes, poetic fragments, family photos, newspaper clippings, and video stills.

         Among the ephemera Bishouty reproduces are everyday notes handwritten by her father. One of these, featuring directions for where to buy rubber above a sketch of a mosque, grabbed my eye: it includes my own family name, written in Arabic. The corner my grandfather’s store occupied in Beirut’s Furn El-Chebbak neighborhood was known by his name, and landmarks, not street addresses, orient Beirut’s residents. This chance materialization of our families’ partially overlapping trajectories infused our conversation on displacement, memory, archives, and Palestine — presented below in abridged and lightly edited form — with a personal significance amplified by the emotions recent events in Palestine have stirred.