Detours / 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.

Header image: Opening event for the exhibition ‘In the Heart of Another Country: The Diasporic Imagination Rises’ curated by Omar Kholeif, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2023. Photo courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE. Photo: Moataz Nasr. Featured artwork: Anuar Khalifi, ‘Talwin Tamkin’, 2022. Diptych: Acrylic on Canvas. Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, UAE.