Nour Bishouty

Building loosely on the form of a pocket-sized travel guide, this artist’s book unfolds into a 731.52 cm wide miniature landscape. Composed of hand-painted and digitally illustrated images stitched together into a continuous sequence, the book includes a poem and short narrative by the artist, an essay co-authored with Daniella Sanader and an afterword by Heather Canlas Rigg. A sticker sheet featuring animal and plant forms is included as an insert.

Functioning as a poetic visual-textual essay, the book unsettles the familiar logic of travel guides and the explorer’s gaze. It troubles the impulses of sightseeing, navigation, and tourism, while calling into question the authoritative languages of archaeology, botany, taxonomy and cartography. It emerges from ongoing inquiries in Nour Bishouty’s practice around permission, legibility and understanding.

Through critical reflections, lyrical fragments, and visual fictions, the book offers a layered exploration of artistic inheritance, colonial spectacle and epistemic dissonance. It challenges legibility and authority, foregrounding ambiguity, misunderstanding and refusal as generative strategies.

Published in conjunction with Nour Bishouty’s exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, presented as part of Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK, curated by Marie-Anne McQuay.

Published in 2025 by Art Metropole, in collaboration with Liverpool Biennial and Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, with support from Cooper Cole.