Nour Bishouty in Conversation with Leyla El Sayed Hussein : 1-130 | Discussion and Library Intervention

We are excited to have Nour Bishouty with us for a public conversation around her artist book, 1–130: Selected works Ghassan Bishouty b. 1941 Safad, Palestine – d. 2004 Amman, Jordan, edited by Jacob Korczynski, designed by Laura Pappa & Lotte Lara Schröder and co-published by Art Metropole & Motto Books, at the Beirut Art Center’s Library. Nour will be intervening on the library walls with an installation, and will be  in conversation with Leyla El Sayed Hussein around questions in her artist book, expanding on archival practices of sorting, cataloging, and indexing that she borrows from and questions. The book will be available for purchase at our bookstore. 

Published in early 2021, Nour Bishouty’s artist’s book 1—130 draws upon her ongoing research into the works of her father, Ghassan Bishouty. Borrowing methods of indexing and object classification as codes for identification, value, and legacy, she questions which images and objects are made to manifest through an artist’s practice, which disappear, and which traverse across place and time to avow their resistance. All the while, Bishouty employs paratactic strategies of text and image to understand the life and work of an artist faced with the discontinuity of deracination. 

Nour Bishouty is a visual artist working in a range of media including works on paper, digital images, sculpture, video, and writing. Her practice engages familial and material narratives to explore colonial legacies and pose questions around dissonance, opacity, legibility, and the generative possibilities of misunderstanding.

Leyla El Sayed Hussein researches, teaches, and writes about digital philosophy and architecture. Her research falls at the intersection of historical architectural urban narratives and the boom of the digital age. She is an adjunct faculty member at the School of Architecture and Design at LAU.

This event is the first iteration of our new public program for the BAC Library, A Vanishing Focal Point, where artists and writers are invited to intervene on the physicality of the library and its contents. Through these gestures, we can rethink what type of acts, spaces, organization and systematization are conducive for artistic research. How is knowledge generated through creative practices? By shifting the space, the interventions are meant to act like a slanted note in the margins that shifts the framing of a book already written. They might point us to how knowledge is translated into awareness, and maybe teach us to read the room.