Events > Artist Talk/Lecture

27 Sep. 2022

Nour Bishouty in Conversation with Swapnaa Tamhane at Maktaba, Montreal

Artist
Nour Bishouty
Speaker
Swapnaa Tamhane
Time
6-8PM
Offsite Location
Librairie Maktaba Bookshop, 165 Saint-Paul St W, Montreal, Quebec H2Y 1Z5

VOLUME 5 MTL x Art Metropole x Maktaba
Librarie Maktaba, 165 Rue Saint-Paul O, Montréal, QC H2Y 1Z5
September 27, 2022 – 6-8PM

Art Metropole and Maktaba, in partnership with Volume 5, present Nour Bishouty in conversation with Swapnaa Tamhane. In her recent artist book, 1—130, Bishouty draws upon the work of her late father, artist Ghassan Bishouty (b. 1941 Palestine – d. 2004, Jordan). Borrowing from museological methods of indexing and object classification to lend her father’s history and work a form of pseudo-visibility and order, Bishouty simultaneously unsettles structural conventions and permeates her father’s artworks and ephemera with her own acts of collage, ekphrasis, and storytelling. Ending with an afterword by curator and editor Jacob Korczynski, the book is a meditation on displacement, memory, archives, and Palestine. 1—130 was co-published by Art Metropole, Toronto and Motto Books, Berlin.

Bishouty will be joined by Montreal-based artist and curator Swapnaa Tamhane to discuss the book, its making and where it is situated in her wider practice.


Nour Bishouty is a visual artist working in a range of media including digital images, works on paper, sculpture, video, and writing. Her multidisciplinary practice draws upon autobiographical and material narratives to explore how dominant notions of value are articulated and exchanged, often focusing on the construction of popular identity in relation to histories of place. Nour was a fellow at the 2014/15 Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut. Her work has been exhibited in venues such as Darat Al Funun, Amman; Access Gallery, Vancouver; the Beirut Art Centre, the Helen Day Art Centre, Vermont; Casa Arabe, Madrid and Cordoba; and the Mosaic Rooms, London.

Swapnaa Tamhane works to destabilize and untether colonial constructs as an artist, curator, and writer. Her process focuses on the presence of her hand in making paper and the treatment of surfaces. She works with drawing, textiles, handmade paper, text, and sculpture. She also works in collaboration with artisan-designers in Kutch, Gujarat, India, working with block printing and embroidery. She has exhibited her work at A Space Gallery, Toronto; Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa; articule, Montreal; ROM, Toronto, and V&A Dundee, Scotland

In 2001, for her MA dissertation, she wrote about Gayatri Spivak’s theory of the subaltern in relation to the work of Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani, and Rummana Hussain, looking at the rise of the Hindu right-wing and communalism in India following the events at the Babri Masjid, Ayodhya, in 1992. Hussain was then a central focus of the group exhibition “In Order to Join – the Political in a Historical Moment”, held at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, and CSMVS, Mumbai (2013-2015).

Tamhane has been a Research Fellow with Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute (2009), and an International Fellow with Kulturstiftung des Bundes (2013). She has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, and Kunststiftung NRW.

Her interests in craft and design led to the publication of SĀR: The Essence of Indian Design, published by Phaidon Press (2016), curated and written together with Delhi-based designer Rashmi Varma
Image

Illustration of the forthcoming publication 1—130. Nour Bishouty.

  1. 1—130