BEDROCK Liverpool Biennial 2025
An extent of space to stretch the body

2025

Exhibition: Sculpture, works on paper, textile, embroidery, writing, and digital map projections

This series of sculptures (2022-ongoing) take as their point of departure the art-historical term staffage: the minor human or animal figures traditionally inserted into landscape paintings to animate a scene or suggest scale. Historically marginal and compositional in function, such figures operate in service of the landscape rather than as autonomous forms. In this series, that peripheral role is foregrounded and condensed, allowing the figure to slip from illustrative device into an intransigent presence. The animal bodies are stretched and distorted, reflecting a broader use of distortion in Bishouty’s work as a poetic register through which meaning accumulates and remains unresolved.
Landscape functions critically within Nour Bishouty’s practice as a system of representation shaped by power, erasure, and distortion. Across this ongoing series of sculptures, Bishouty activates an indirect relationship with “Al-Wadi,” an oil painting made in the early 1980s by her late father depicting an imaginary Bedouin tribe in the Jordanian desert. Through years of return and reworking, she treats reference as layered and unstable, leaving origin deliberately unsettled.

Nothing is lost except nothing at all except what is not had, 2022, at Bedrock, Liverpool Biennial 2025, Liverpool UK

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