Unlikely Mother

(Madre improbable)

2026

Exhibition: sculpture, film, video, works on paper

Madre Improbable is Bishouty’s first solo museum exhibition in Mexico. It brings together two films and a group of sculptures, and works on paper. At its centre, her film Catfish Mother Puddle of Juice (2026) uses the figures of mother and child to consider the visual and linguistic frameworks that assign coherence, value, and legitimacy to bodies. The work draws on research into catfish morphology alongside questions of bodily difference, inheritance, and legibility. Across the exhibition, gestures and objects return to the hand as a site where meaning is produced and unsettled. Language remains central, shaping how bodies are named and understood, and where they exceed those terms. The artist’s practice moves across sculpture, moving image, works on paper, and artist publishing. It attends to fragmentation in history and to the ways knowledge and fantasy are produced and withheld. Working from historical materials as unstable sites shaped by translation and distortion, her practice draws on an interest in the languages through which bodies are disciplined and made legible.

Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City

Curator: Miguel Lopez

Unlikely Mother, 2026, Museo del Chopo, Mexico City, January 31–May 24, 2026 Images Courtesy of the artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto. Photo: Ramiro Chaves

Exhibition text MOETHER, by Mirene Arsanios [pdf]

Produced by Museo Universitario del Chopo with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico.