Visual Arts Open Lecture Series: Nour Bishouty

Nour Bishouty, photo by Yuula Benivolski

 

Join us for an afternoon presentation by Nour Bishouty, a multidisciplinary artist working across video, sculpture, works on paper, digital images, and writing.

In this talk, she traces the through-lines of her practice, examining how personal experience becomes legible within broader cultural and historical contexts. Drawing on works from the past decade, she explores how familial and inherited narratives can function as a counter-archive, using fragmentary traces and speculative gestures to unsettle systems that claim to organize meaning, including taxonomy, archives, museology, and colonial logics. She reflects on how misreading, absence, and distortion operate as material conditions in her work, and asks what becomes visible when certainty slips. She also examines how not knowing, or not fully understanding, might itself become a way of paying closer attention.

She is a faculty member for the Early Career Banff Artist in Residence 2026, a transformative five-week residency that provides mentorship, critical feedback, and studio time to visual artists in the early stages of their careers. 

This event is part of the Visual Arts Open Lecture Series, which presents talks by leading Canadian and international artists, curators, and academics.

Visual Arts is supported by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Program.