Omar Kholeif
Dr Omar Kholeif is the avatar of Doctor O—Pop Physician and the heteronym of several non-Portuguese poets. Born in Cairo, Egypt, they were raised in Glasgow, Scotland, Los Angeles, CA, and elsewhere. An author of over two dozen critical volumes on art, a curator of more than seventy exhibitions, and a cultural historian, they are the founding principal of artPost21, a not-for-profit publishing and broadcast platform for artists and their dreamwork. A visiting professor in the school of arts and creative industries at Teesside University, UK since 2018, they have served Sharjah Art Foundation (Govt. of Sharjah), UAE, where they are director of collections and senior curator. Their recent books include, Nil Yalter: Circular Tension (2024), Magda Stawarska (2024), and Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs (2023), forthcoming in 2025 is their long-awaited critical biography on Huguette Caland published as part of imagine/otherwise.
The voices assembled here, all artistic or literary in one way or another, have created a frame, a window, a tunnel, or a portal to tell stories that open into an emotional politics via the act of looking. Their work is a form of woolgathering, a vocation of and for the polyglot voice.
Sunny Rahbar is the co-founder of The Third Line, a contemporary art gallery in Dubai. Anuar Khalifi is an artist who lives between Barcelona and Tangier and makes figurative paintings that address questions of identity, place, and society. They joined Dr. Omar Kholeif in a conversation about what it means to create community, how imagination plays a role in the process, and the shifting nature of perception from one culture to another.
Celia Hempton and Omar Kholeif engage in a conversation about the artist's practice, background, and faithfulness to the image.
It is late evening in London, and I am attempting to speak to Sonia in New York. She is aged eighty at this point. Her son, Arné, downloads WhatsApp onto her mobile phone and within the space of minutes, I have three missed calls from her. I dial back hurriedly; she is a little out of breath.
Over a period of days Dr Omar Kholeif and the artist Vian Sora corresponded via voice notes that they sent back and forth in a call and response manner. Kholeif was in Sharjah then in London then in Sharjah again; Sora was in Dubai then in Louisville, KY. The topics of painting, literature, history—and how they intertwine and influence the choices of an artist arise over and again.
