“In Ballout’s work, the artist strikes an affective relationship to the past, that neither privileges the logics of official archives nor the written histories of the state, but instead, weaves together subjugated accounts drawn intimate personal spaces and collective sites of belonging.”- juror Gee Wesley, Curatorial Assistant Department of Media and Performance, MoMA.

Nour Ballout is the 2024 LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation Artadia Awardee.

Nour Ballout (b. 1993 Beirut, Lebanon) is an interdisciplinary maker and curator challenging who and what is erased in an archive / history, constructed by the colonizer. Their practice is an institutional critique that looks inward first at how we have come to embody the institution. They disentangle structures of power & naturalization as they manifest within bodies, relationships & built environments.

Nour Ballout is nostalgic for a country which doesn’t exist on a map.

As an immigrant from Lebanon to Detroit to Dearborn, they come from an intersection of people that have been looked at and surveilled, but never seen. In subject and form, their art apprehends the roots and effects of historical otherness and invisibility.

bell hooks writes that looking “is a site of resistance.” Solmaz Sharif reveals that according to the US military’s dictionary, a “look” is when a bomb goes off and kills life. Nour’s practice grapples with the ways that looking can manifest as both resistance and violence, all the while negotiating the tension between visibility, documentation, and surveillance. The desire to be seen and represented is loaded with a fear of being watched. Working with a variety of mediums such as photography, sculpture, and installation, they seek new possibilities for looking by playing across the spectrum of representation and abstraction, subject and object.