Art Metropole

19 Jul. 2025

Book Launch: 731.52 cm of land

Time

3:00-5:00 PM

Please join us at on (DATE) from (TIME) for the launch of 731.52 cm of land, a new artist’s book by Nour Bishouty. The publication launch will feature a conversation between Nour Bishouty and poet Zoe Imani Sharpe hosted at Gallery TPW (170 St. Helens Ave) as a part of Palestine All the Time. Palestine All the Time is a 24-hour program that brings together Palestinian artists, writers, filmmakers, scholars, and activists, curated by Toleen Touq.

Building loosely on the form of a pocket-sized travel guide, 731.52 cm of land unfolds into a 731.52 cm wide miniature landscape. Composed of hand-painted and digitally illustrated images stitched together into a continuous sequence, the book includes a poem and short narrative by the artist, an essay co-authored with Daniella Sanader, and an afterword by Heather Canlas Rigg. A sticker sheet featuring animal and plant forms is included as an insert.

Functioning as a poetic visual-textual essay, the book unsettles the familiar logic of travel guides and the explorer’s gaze. It troubles the impulses of sightseeing, navigation, and tourism, while calling into question the authoritative languages of archaeology, botany, taxonomy, and cartography. It emerges from ongoing inquiries in Nour Bishouty’s practice around permission, legibility, and understanding.

Through critical reflections, lyrical fragments, and visual fictions, the book offers a layered exploration of artistic inheritance, colonial spectacle, and epistemic dissonance. It challenges legibility and authority, foregrounding ambiguity, misunderstanding, and refusal as generative strategies.

This event is co-presented by Art Metropole, Gallery 44, and Gallery TPW, as a part of Palestine All the Time.

731.52 cm of land was published in 2025 by Art Metropole, in collaboration with Liverpool Biennial and Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, with support from Cooper Cole.

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Nour Bishouty is a multidisciplinary artist working across video, sculpture, works on paper, digital images, and writing. Broadly concerned with gaps in archival memory and the Western production of knowledge and fantasy, her practice explores notions of articulation, permission, and the generative possibilities of misunderstanding. She is the author of 1_—130: Selected works Ghassan Bishouty b. 1941 Safad, Palestine — d. 2004 Amman, Jordan_ (2020), edited by Jacob Korczynski and co-published by Art Metropole and Motto Books.

Zoe Imani Sharpe is a poet working with collaborative language practices and reciprocal forms of education, including reading groups and interdisciplinary projects. Her writing often explores embodied memory through emergent, dispersive, and serial forms, crosscutting the binary of interior and exterior. She was the 2023 Poet-In-Residence at Gallery TPW, and her first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming with Wendy’s Subway in 2026.

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