“Before its intentions, form or content are worked through, a book is encountered bodily. To hold, feel, and flip through a book is also to know it. Within the ekphrastic and paratactic strategies at work here, one constant is the collection of colour plates of digital collages. Acting as stations from which we depart from Ghassan Bishouty’s biography, the collages are an unsettled supplement to his daughter Nour Bishouty’s speculative history. First photographed, then pulled apart on a monitor before being spatialized for the page, Ghassan’s paintings return, separated in a search, as if arriving at a foundation may allow for an arrival closer to the artist and their intentions. Collages too, are containers.”

Excerpt from the afterword by Jacob Korczynski

In her artist book, 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.

1—130 constitutes reflexive encounters with a series of 130 selected paintings and sculptures made circa 1965-2004 in Lebanon and Jordan, and concludes with an afterword by editor and curator Jacob Korczynski.

Credits

Editor Jacob Korczynski
Graphic design Laura Pappa & Lotte Schröder
Publisher Art Metropole, Toronto and Moto Books, Berlin

The artist and Art Metropole gratefully acknowledge support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture AFAC.

The artist and editor would like to thank: Negar Azimi, Rayya Badran, Jon Davies, Sameer Farooq, Luisa Ji, Steve Kado, Nahed Mansour, Jerrold McGrath, Mohamad Mersal, Sohrab Mohebbi, Andreea Muscurel, Kimberly Phillips, Christine Tohme, Toleen Touq, Maisaa Youssef, and Omar Al Zo’bi