Fellow Travellers is a 112-page authored book by Omar Kholeif that works as a creative portfolio, bringing together painting, poetry, lens-based work and critical writing in a single volume. It presents, for the first time in twenty years, a body of Kholeif's paintings (2020–2026) in oil, egg tempera, pigment and mixed media, many built up over several years; a sequence of six poems; and Forever Someone Else (2010–ongoing), a portrait drawn from a living archive of 35mm photography begun in 2008 and conceived as a projection accompanied by the artist's voice.
The research asks how an artist-historian might use making as a method of inquiry into curatorial research and art history: how paint, verse and the photographic archive can hold what conventional art-historical writing cannot, namely memory, exile, estrangement and repair.
The central essay situates this practice alongside five women painters whose careers were shaped by migration and critical neglect: Sonia Balassanian, Jai Chuhan, Lalitha Lajmi, Luísa Correia Pereira and Irene Scheinmann. Drawing on archival fieldwork, estate correspondence and studio visits, it develops a method of 're-dreaming', in dialogue with Toni Morrison's concept of 'rememory', Édouard Glissant's errantry and Stuart Hall's theory of articulation, and reads the Soviet-era term poputchik ('one who travels the same path') as a politics of quiet solidarity.
The book's originality lies in its hybrid form, in which artist, poet and historian occupy the same position. The poems, opening with 'The Poets', trace a mother's silenced vocation as a writer and the author's own creative life, long lived under avatars and heteronyms. The paintings answer them as acts of reconciliation and restitution, an embodied exploration of 'female worlding' and maternal inheritance. Forever Someone Else extends this into a diasporic archive of travel, loss and disappearance.
Reviewed by an anonymous panel of international curators and scholars, the book extends Kholeif's imagine/otherwise series (Sternberg Press) and initiates a decade-long research programme on re-dreaming modernisms. It is published to accompany the exhibition Fellow Travellers, curated by Kholeif at Tabari Artspace, DIFC, Dubai (8 October–30 November 2026).
