Nour Bishouty, Sitting-Donkey-Cage-Edit-1, Screen capture of 3D model, 2021.

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography

Nothing is lost except nothing at all except what is not had
Nour Bishouty
Co-curated by Toleen Touq and Lillian O’Brien Davis

Exhibition Dates: February 2 – March 5, 2022

This exhibition, Nour Bishouty’s first solo show in Toronto, centres on an oil painting made by her late father, Ghassan Bishouty, in Amman in the early 1980s. Nour is no stranger to her late father’s work, returning to it consistently over the years, posing questions around cultural value, personal and artistic legacies. This time, the artist takes Al-Wadi, an orientalist-style painting of a Bedouin landscape in Jordan as a point of departure to explore unregulated systems of mapping and legibility. In Nothing is lost except nothing at all except what is not had, the artist engages in a process of intentional obscurity with the painting to consider the idea of misunderstanding as a productive lens—intertwining and unfolding objects, images and ways of seeing. Replication, expansion, extrapolation and modification are used as interventions to redirect our lines of inquiry into unchartered horizons.

By suggesting spectres of absence and presence, the exhibition troubles our assumptions of awaited resolution or structured narration. The title of the show is borrowed from Gertrude Stein’s essay ‘Composition as Explanation’ which explores the “prolonged” and “continuous” presents in the structure of compositions. By proposing or suggesting new lenses through which to read the painting, Nour’s work extends its temporal register and simultaneously questions the stakes involved when re-orienting and re-settling it into contemporary contexts.

Join the artist Nour Bishouty or curators Toleen Touq and Lillian O’Brien Davis for a timed tour of the exhibition. To book your appointment please fill out the form here.

* For more information on our safety protocols for visitors, see our visitor guide.

Co-produced with SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre)

Nour Bishouty (b. 1986 Amman, Jordan) is a Canadian visual artist of Palestinian heritage 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. Bishouty’s work has been exhibited in Canada and internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Toronto), Access Gallery (Vancouver), Darat Al Funun (Amman), the Beirut Art Centre, Casa Arabe (Madrid & Córdoba), and the Mosaic Rooms (London). Her artist book, 1—130, a meditation on displacement, archives, memory, and Palestine, was co-published in 2020 by Art Metropole, Toronto and Motto Books, Berlin.

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) is a non-profit, artist-run centre in Canada dedicated to increasing the visibility of culturally diverse artists by curating and exhibiting their work, providing mentorship, facilitating professional development and creating a community for our artists. SAVAC was founded to be an organization staffed by people of colour, committed to support the work of artists of colour. SAVAC promotes self-representation by developing artistic practice that is often informed by cultural identity through a range of mediums, aesthetics, forms, and techniques. SAVAC supports work that (in)directly addresses the ways histories of people of colour are represented alongside the story of ongoing colonialism on Turtle Island and post-colonial histories of the global south. These works are challenging, experimental and offer multifarious perspectives on the contemporary world.

Bidemi Oloyede, Pride, Toronto, Canada, 2018.

Perigon/Paragon
Bidemi Oloyede

Exhibition Dates: February 2 – March 5, 2022
(Vitrines)

As the winner of the 2019 Verant Richards Award, Bidemi Oloyede explores the process of Platinum-Palladium in a contemporary context to present images from his street photography archive. The artist combines his passion for the historical medium of photography with his interest in the human condition. Oloyede explores the concept of “archival permanence” with prints known to outlast even the printer.

Oloyede’s choice to present Toronto street scenes in this format ensures that his contemporary street scenes are preserved for generations to come in a so-called “permanent archive”. Oloyede describes the impetus for his project, “So much of black photographic history is lost. Informed by the mediums and methods of care [he] chooses in his process, [he] wants to continue the tradition of making photographs that last.”

Bidemi Oloyede is an emerging street and portrait documentary photographer born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Now living and working in Toronto, Canada, he uses black and white film to capture both vulnerable and vibrant images that tell a story about his subjects and community. He combines his passion for the historical medium of photography with his interest in the human condition.

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography is a charitable, non-profit, artist-run centre committed to supporting multi-faceted approaches to photography and lens-based media. Founded in 1979 to establish a supportive environment for the development of artistic practice, Gallery 44’s mandate is to provide a context for meaningful reflection and dialogue on contemporary photography.

Gallery 44 is committed to programs that reflect the continuously changing definition of photography by presenting a wide range of practices that engage timely and critical explorations of the medium. Through exhibitions, public engagement, education programs and production facilities our objective is to explore the artistic, cultural, historic, social and political implications of the image in our ever-expanding visual world.

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 120
Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8
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Maegan Broadhurst
Head of Communications and Development
maegan@gallery44.org
416.979.3941 ext.4