Omar Kholeif

Biography
Omar Kholeif

Omar Kholeif (Prof. Dr PhD CF FRSA) is an artist, author, curator and cultural historian. Born in Cairo, Egypt, to Egyptian and Sudanese parents, and raised between Glasgow, Los Angeles and elsewhere, Kholeif's intellectual formation was shaped by early careers in music criticism and broadcast documentary production - an itinerant beginning that continues to inflect a practice attuned to migration, media and the textures of diasporic life. Alongside painting and poetry, Kholeif spent several years broadcasting as the avatar of Doctor O - The World's Leading Pop Physician.

 

As a visual artist, Kholeif often works under various heteronyms or avatars, deploying the mythological figure of the trickster. They are primarily concerned with exploring the expressive possibilities of painting. They use paint and surface to unearth obscured histories, treating the medium as an archaeological process and building paintings - often over several years - as sites of memory and feeling. 

Kholeif's creative practice across all its forms is animated by the concept that they refer to as "dreamwork": a mode of social imagination concerned with safeguarding and animating diasporic and marginalised aesthetic cultures. In 2012 they founded artPost21, a platform and social enterprise for artists and their dreamwork, whose holdings - including The Dreamwork Collection - centre on women artists and artists of the Global Majority.

 

Kholeif is a Professor in the School of Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art and lives in a reclaimed diaspora.

 

FORMAL EDUCATION

 

PhD, Reading School of Art, University of Reading and Zurich University of the Arts; MA, Royal College of Art, London; MA (Hons), University of Glasgow

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