Courtesy of Omar Kholeif.
This event marks the return of our ‘Detours’ series, in which leading curators are invited to speak about their work, and its relationship to place or context. The series resumes with author, curator, historian, and museum director, Omar Kholeif and their first public talk in Scotland, where they were recently appointed Professor of Global Art Theory and Practice at The Glasgow School of Art.
Dr Kholeif will tour audiences through a freewheeling journey from Glasgow, where they grew up and studied, to Cairo, downward through Khartoum to Chicago, from Jeddah to Los Angeles, via London to Sharjah, and back again. Composed as an epistolary score, Kholeif has titled this journey, ‘Dreaming Out of Blue’ referencing a 1997 exhibition that they witnessed at GoMA curated by their friend, Anne Barlow. (They would come to meet Anne on a dhow in Sharjah during the Sharjah Art Foundation’s 2012 March Meeting).
Happenstance and friendship collide as the author tours through their distinct imagination, linking the two port cities in which they have lived longest — Glasgow and Sharjah. Through aesthetic encounters, one resounding notion comes to bloom: Kholeif’s approach to the creolised “diaspore”. Drawing from ancestral knowledge and critical fabulation one is ennobled to reclaim their diasporic identity. The very state of exile, here, becomes a site of resilience, of survivance.
The event will culminate with a focus on books and Kholeif’s most recent publication, Huguette Caland: imagine/otherwise ‘a hybrid biography and memoir’ of the Lebanese-French-American artist Huguette Caland (1931 – 2019), one of the most significant figures in late modernism, and the subject of an epic survey at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. The book is published by Sternberg Press 2025 and will be available for sale on the evening.
About the speaker /
Omar Kholeif, PhD was born in Egypt to mixed race parents and has lived in a reclaimed diaspora ever since. Dubbed a "Game Changer" by British GQ, a "Force of Culture" in the New York Times, an author of "compulsively readable stories" in the LA Review of Books, who also has the potential to send readers "...down a David Foster Wallace death spiral" as noted in the New York Journal of Books, Kholeif is an award-winning British author, artist, curator and cultural historian. For two-decades, Dr. Kholeif has pushed the boundaries of oral, literary and visual culture with "breathtaking...compelling...path-breaking" exhibitions (FT, NYT, The National) at some of the world's leading museums of modern and contemporary art, where they have served as both curator and director.
In 2012, they founded artPost21, a not-for-profit platform for artists and their “dreamwork”. Their 2023 hybrid memoir, Internet Art published by Phaidon made them a Sunday Times bestselling author. Kholeif has sold more than 150,000 books in the English language, which have been translated into 17 languages. For 20 years, they have self-funded their studio practice and have created an open-access collection and research facility to support marginalised artistic voices of the African diaspora. They are a carer and have recently resolved to move back home with their parents.
Event Details
Thursday 30 October, 6–8pm
Tickets
This event is free and we encourage you to book a ticket in advance.
Access
The talk takes place in The Common Guild’s library space on the ground floor of 5 Florence Street.
5 Florence Street has step free access and a lift.
Accessible toilets are available.
The nearest subway station is Bridge Street, a 14 minute walk away.
