The Brooklyn Rail

“We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream,” said Monica Bellucci’s character in Twin Peaks: The Return, a line which David Lynch borrows from the sacred Hindu texts known as the Upanishads. She continues, looking away from Lynch’s on-screen character to directly address the camera: “But who is the dreamer?” In Finding My Blue Sky, we might imagine a subsequent scene, as curator Omar Kholeif asks in the exhibition’s parallel Arabic title: “What is the world that you dream of?” This major group exhibition, featuring twenty-nine international and intergenerational artists, twelve new commissions, and an active public engagement program, asks how we can be together, dream together, live together, and combine our consciousnesses as we pass through the only reality we know—our own.

The exhibition is curated so that it flows like a dream that jump-cuts, punctuated with text that directs a visitor’s oneiric journey (“Find your soft landing / Find your wave under the cloud”) across Lisson Gallery’s two spaces and creates an experience that intends to “nourish a propositional world of tender and loving politics.” A sense of being drawn upwards by the curator is produced by subtle placements: Celia Hempton’s small but perfectly formed painting Anand, India, 28^th June 2024 (2024) is positioned just below the ceiling, with the central character in transit engrossed in their screen device—a fellow dreamer perhaps. Leiko Ikemura’s Lying Head (2020–21), a face in green cast glass, is positioned at ankle height in the centre of one gallery, gazing upward as if pulling from the ground in an incorporeal transition. Magda Stawarska’s striking vertical In the Looking Glass (2025) draws eyes upward in scene shots made using multiple sheets of copper and aluminum with silkscreen printing, hand-painting and more silkscreening, like a roll of film whose images blur in the memory, transcending what the camera alone could capture.

In both of Lisson Gallery’s sites, just a short walk apart, works by Portuguese artist Luísa Correia Pereira and Lebanese artist Huguette Caland create a mythical dramaturgy that pulls us through and beyond spatial constrictions. Caland’s oil painting Pink Feeling Blue (1973) provides the colors that shape the exhibition’s central identity, a pink fleshy expanse permeated by blue lines forming a cross, a horizon where our souls can meet. Near the entrance of the same space, Pereira’s 1989 untitled acrylic features a central white circle with rainbow lines flowing out from it. Further works of both artists include figures, scenes, self-portraits and several of Pereira’s distinctive triangular “steps,” all gently encouraging reflection in their distinctive styles. Pereira and Caland are two of a subset of artists on view who are no longer with us. Memory is evoked through graphic matches and subtle repetition, both a reminder of our impermanence and of the need to locate ourselves in the present.

Finding My Blue Sky also situates us firmly in its Northwest London locale, literally starting on the street with Lubaina Himid’s There Could Be an Endless Ocean (2018), its distinctive red lungs and blue framing enlarged into a street mural boldly greeting the diverse local communities that inhabit this fluctuating, transitory world. The exhibition is, after all, a “love-letter to London,” as Kholeif puts it—a love letter to the city that has shaped the dreams of millions through its unique metaphysical and visceral experience. Paul Heyer’s I am the Sky (Carroll Street Version) (2025) feels like it holds the key to explaining how there can indeed be dreams within our dreams. Works by artists as diverse as Simone Fattal and Sean Scully are perhaps unlikely friends but serene neighbors, respectful of each other’s space and habitat. Here dreams coexist in rooms that share walls and thus become connected by sheer proximity.

At moments, sculpture and photography bring us into different spheres than painting. A series that Hrair Sarkissian has not publicly displayed before, “La Peau” (2003–23) forms landscapes from body shapes that hold the artist’s pain while offering catharsis. Sarkissian “kept them, a secret, waiting for better days to come” (as he wrote in the Rail), and now, after time and distance they are shared in an act of healing for both artist and audience—the very connection at the heart of the exhibition as a whole. This also reflects the darkness of the narrative at play; many of the works reference—whether overtly or covertly—isolation, trouble, and trauma for us or the world. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s horizontal large-scale photograph of a murky, mysterious sky, Air Conditioning (2022), is actually built from open source data on military transgressions into Lebanese airspace.

Before the Upanishads tell us about “the dreamer,” the text notes that “We are like the spider. / We weave our life and then move along in it.” Every room of this exhibition connects with the beautiful simplicity and terrifying complexity of our individual and collective missions to find our own blue skies. The show reminds us that we’re all weaving away like the spider, often unaware of our own mastery or the fragility of our creations, but searching hopefully and dreaming of what might be nonetheless. I feel as if there’s an auteur at play (who is this dreamer?) and I exit the show with the sense that I just experienced a special kind of curatorial cinema, falling out of the darkness and squinting into the bright afternoon sun of the city.