https://orcid.org/0009-0002-0126-318X
Professor Kholeif is concerned with the concept of “dreamwork”—the work of safeguarding aesthetic culture. This, they argue is the necessary role of historians, curators, and academics today.
Their relationship to this field of discourse emerged via research into the concept of “difference”—the embodied experience of erasure and coterminously examining the influence of seeming “marginal error” in history. Kholeif analyses the social, aesthetic and political impulses surrounding “difference” through an interdisciplinary approach that draws from cultural studies and anthropology threading through the crosscurrents of visual culture.
Working as an historian, author, artist, curator and museum director, Professor Omar Kholeif has been recognised internationally for their influential work, exploring the diasporic imagination through their study of contemporary media. Arguing that pictures exert their own agency over society, Kholeif explores the systems that enable various cultural tools to generate new epistemic structures.
Working with artists and architects; historians and authors; technologists and entrepreneurs, Professor Kholeif has constituted multivalent acts of world building through books, biennials, broadcast, museum exhibitions, and through the (re)imagining of public collections and archives.
As a scholar and educator, they welcome prospective students who are eager to engage with their own culturally situated contexts.
Art and Artists
Over the last two decades, I have performed substantive research, authoring numerous texts and publications on modern and contemporary artists including:
Etel Adnan, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Yto Barrada, Sonia Balassanian, Judith Barry, Fiona Banner, Zarina Bhimji, Lynette Yiadom-Bokaye, Carlos Bunga, Huguette Caland, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Jimmie Durham, Simon Denny, Simone Fattal, Ryan Gander, Celia Hempton, Lubaina Himid CBE RA, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Helen Khal, Astrid Klein, David Koloane, Anuar Khalifi, Lalitha Lajmi, Emily Jacir, Derek Jarman, Rashid Johnson, Marwan, Otobong Nkanga, Trevor Paglen, Heather Phillipson, Michael Rakowitz, James Richards, Nil Yalter, Hrair Sarkissian, Sean Scully, Peter Sedgley, Hassan Sharif, Wael Shawky, Magda Stawarska and Akram Zaatari.
Areas of PhD Supervision:
Professor Kholeif is keen to consider proposals for PhD Proposals in any of the following broad focus areas:
o Situating Race, Ethnicity and Nation in Curatorial Practice.
o Narratives of the Diasporic Imagination
o Cross-cultural Dialogues in Exhibition Making
o Curating as Artistic Praxis
o Women in Global Exhibition Histories
o Inclusivity in Institutional Modeling
o Evolving Models in Curatorial Practice and Museulogy
o Biographical Exhibitions
o Authorship and Publishing in the Expanded Field of Curating
o Curating as Memoir
o Curating Collections
o Conservation and Collection Care
o The Field of Art and Emerging Technology
o Curating Queer Modernisms
o Re-orientating the Knowledge Field around Epistemic Violence
o Curating Marginalia
o Curating in Translation
*Subjects broadly related to the above.
Experience (select)
o Director of Collections and Senior Curator, Sharjah Art Foundation, Govt. of Sharjah, UAE
o Research Professor, Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art Research Unit, Teesside University
o Manilow Senior Curator and Director of Global Initiatives, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
o Curator, Whitechapel Gallery
o Director of Art, Residencies and Technology, SPACE, London
o Senior Curator, Cornerhouse and Home, Manchester
o Curator, FACT, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology
o Founding Artistic Director, Safar Film Festival, Arab British Centre, London
Education
o PhD, University of Reading
o MA, Royal College of Art
o PGCert, Screen Academy Scotland
o MA, University of Glasgow
Publications (select):
o Huguette Caland: imagine/otherwise (Sternberg Press, 2025)
o Otobong Nkanga: Stitched Dreams (Lisson Gallery/Artbook D.A.P., 2024)
o Peter Sedgley: 5 Decades (Redfern Gallery, 2024)
o Nil Yalter: Circular Tension (Mousse Publishing, 2024)
o Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs (Phaidon, 2023)
o Helen Khal: Gallery One and Beirut in the 1960s (with Carla Chammas and Rachel Dedman) (Sternberg Press, 2023)
o Sonia Balassanian: imagine/otherwise (Sternberg Press, 2022)
o Perpetual Inventory (The Third Line, 2022)
o In the Heart of Another Country: The Diasporic Imagination Rises (Snoeck, 2022)
o Art in the Age of Anxiety (Mörel Books and The MIT Press, 2021)
o Hrair Sarkissian: The Other Side of Silence (with Theodor Ringborg) (Lenz, 2021)
o Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age (Sternberg Press, 2018)
o Michael Rakowitz: Backstroke of the West (Delmonico Books, 2017)
o Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century (Cornerhouse Books/Artbook D.A.P., 2016) (with Sarah Perks)
o Electronic Superhighway: From Experiments in Art and Technology to the Rise of the Internet (Whitechapel Gallery/Artboook D.A.P., 2016)
o The Rumors of the World: Rethinking Trust in the Age of the Internet (Sternberg Press, 2015)
o Imperfect Chronology: Arab Art from the Modern to the Contemporary (Prestel, 2015)
o Emily Jacir: Europa (Prestel, 2015)
o You Are Here: Art After the Internet (Cornerhouse, SPACE/Artbook D.A.P. 2014)
o Vision, Memory, Media (Liverpool University Press, 2010) (with Andreas Broegger)
o Far and Wide: Name June Paik (Leonardo, 2010)
Dreamwork; postcolonial, anti-colonial, de-colonial histories, movements and aesthetics. Platform culture: to imagine/otherwise; the field of emotional abstraction; the erotics of light in the mage, code-switching, the diasporic imagination
o Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
o Creative Capital| Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts
o Thoma Foundation for the Arts
o Sotheby’s Prize
o Situating Race, Ethnicity and Nation in Curatorial Field
o Narratives of the Diasporic Imagination
o Cross-cultural Dialogues in Exhibition Making
o Women in Global Exhibition Histories
o Curating Collections
o Evolving Curatorial Models
Programme Leader - Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art)
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