Co-Curated by Nour Ballout and Roula David the “To Make Is To Stay” exhibition merges traditional and non-traditional gallery spaces, from the white walls of Galerie Camille to the art cafe/bar Spot Lite and even billboards in the streets, this is an art exhibit spanning the city. This collection includes paintings, mixed media prints, documentary photography, sculpture, experimental textile prints, and more. Here are the internal landscapes of deeply rooted peoples with their roots in the air.
“To Make Is To Stay” invites attendees into the intimate heartscape of the migrant artist. Amidst all the vigorous movement and gyrations of earth and man’s cruelty, these artists’ works insist on presence, survival, evolution, color, visionings of the timeless present-future tense. They invite you in. Minimal and maximal. Momentary and eternal. These artists catch the inevitably fleeting moment, and in doing so, invite us to stay. Grace Lee Boggs once said, the most radical thing you can do is to stay put. We extend this to a poem, a painting, a photograph. Pay attention. Stay put. What will you do with your staying? What will you make?
Caught in running streams of intergenerational transnational migratory motion, we create new blueprints for being when we do our own mapping. We cross borders, they cross us, they delineate themselves inside our bodies. Arab. Arab American. Yemeni-East African-Khaleeji. Palestinian-Kuwaiti. Lebanese-Emirati. Dearborn Arab. Arab Detroiter. Brooklyn Beiruti. Even as we move across borders, we carry with us suitcases ephemeral and Samsonite. In scatter and abstraction, we create space for new imagined geographies within our bodies and the landscapes of our material and natural world. We create cartographies with our beings. The self as an orb in motion. The flag painted on a grid of scattered nations. The dispersal of an art gallery across a city map.
Every story is only part of another, more vast. This exhibition seeks to show how many voices there are and how many still have yet to be heard. We cannot encapsulate in this collection the breadth of all the experiences of Arab and Arabized diasporas. We can only show you where we are, what we have brought with us, what we have left behind, and what we make. Here. Today.
“Chosen” is an exhibit of Shterna Goldbloom and Nour Ballout’s work that brings together cultures and experiences that often seem opposite or contradictory: Jewish and Islamic religions and traditions, and faith and queerness. Both queer artists from religious backgrounds, Goldbloom and Ballout pull from their different faith experiences and upbringings to ask how art can be a space for conversation, community building, and reimagining spirituality. The exhibit begins with two tables, one for Ballout’s Ramadan iftar dinner table and the other for Goldbloom’s traditional Shabbos table. The table, both an art piece and a performance space, is also the place where the two works reclaim long-held customs and rituals of breaking bread and building kinship. This exhibition blurs and disrupts false lines between religions, nation-states, peoples, and genders.
When Goldbloom and Ballout first met they quickly found home in one another's shared experiences of family and faith. With “Chosen,” they place the Ramadan iftar and Shabbos table side by side; inviting the viewer, and dinner guest, to find surprising points of connections between the two meals. But rather than collapse differences between the two cultures, traditions, and religions, this exhibition is interested in keeping distinction alongside connection.
The blend of Goldbloom and Ballout’s work, art practices, and communities come together in “Chosen” to create a unique exhibit, one that is part photography, performance art, installation art, and community building. “Chosen” will feature photographic and installation works from both artists. Included in the frame are portraits, stills, and abstract work, depicting the stories of people who fit between the usual gender and religious categories, landscapes, and those who linger at the borderline. It celebrates the experience of being undefined and living in contradictions. Beyond the work itself, Ballout and Goldbloom align in their process, in the care they show the people they photograph and their stories. “Chosen” is the culmination of their work, friendship, life experiences, and fantasies for the future.
OUT OF PLACE
May 17, 2021 -June 25, 2021
In an effort to remedy the loss of opportunities from the closure of cultural institutions, this exhibition utilizes billboards all over the city of Chicago to display the works of graduate students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Transforming the ways we traditionally encounter works of art, offering up a different means of engagement, that brings artists directly to the people they desire to impact. Public Art Exhibitions on billboards meets people where they're at on their way to the grocery store, to the pharmacy, etc.
This project showcasing the work of Graduate Students at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago was made possible with the support of Red Bull Arts, and was curated by Nour Ballout.
The Habibi Portrait series is a visual manifestation of the Habibi House Residency.
Habibi House Residency
Habibi House, part studio and part residency, is an alternative space where artists, curators and community share and collaborate with each other. It is an ongoing project that acts as a home for others and invites us to collectively engage in the process of reimagining home.
Habibi House is a two bedroom home in the shadows of the historic Motown Museum. The space is essentially an interactive installation piece of a home, named Habibi meaning my beloved.
At the core of my practice is bringing people together and building community/networks. I invite artists that I want to connect, grow, and build with to be a resident. With being in a Detroit neighborhood, the residency addresses the difference between creating home in a new space and colonizing/gentrifying a community. Throughout the residency we engage in the process of building home through community conversations, studio visits, dinners, and sharing space.
Construction of the Savage is an ongoing journey dissecting what it means to be masculine in communities of color through the lens of trans masculinity. I began by researching how images of black and brown masculinity are constructed. I examined how brown & black masculine bodies are seen as aggressors. This multi-phase work confronts the historical flattening, objectification, and weaponization of black and brown masculine subjectivity. This body of work has come to be because of a brown masculine body behind the camera and in front of it, blurring the boundaries of subject and object.
In the first phase of this project, I begin with the body and the self. Here, I explore my own masculinity in the domestic space. I have photographed myself and the spaces I inhabit, focusing on interactions with space as indications of gender. With this body of work, I want to highlight the multiplicity of layers and textures, the decentering of the singular self, and an ongoing questioning of the ocularityof gender.
The following are selected pieces from the ongoing body of work.
I have been consumed by the idea of home for most of my life. For as long as I could remember, I believed home to be a physical space, a space I would one day find or return to.
When I’d feel nostalgic for home, I’d recall people, scents, smiles, and feelings of connection. I became convinced that home was in the people I loved and I began documenting our relationships. Sometimes they would also photograph me, and together we share authorship over our story.
As the body of work progressed, I came to the realization that I can’t make homes out of people, until I have come home to myself.
The following are selected images from this larger body of work made up of 24 images.
Humans of Detroit is a collaborative project between Noura Ballout Tomas Culver, Molly Zanley, and Nicole Hayden. The project is inspired by Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York (HONY) – is meant to spread a positive light on the city and the people who call it home. This city has such a rich history and culture that is often overlooked in the current National and International media.Through photography and human interaction this project gives insight to the dynamic inhabitants of Detroit.
The following are selected pieces by Noura Ballout from this collaborative body of work that ran from 2013-2015
www.humansofdetroit.com