Omar Kholeif Egyptian, British
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, Kholeifs 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 0 - 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.
Kholeifs 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 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
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS AND PERFORMANCES
2026, Afterglow, Tabari at Frieze Cork Street, London
2026, Fellow Travellers, Tabari Art Space, DIFC, Dubai
2025, Dream working a Life: A Rehearsal, Mudam: The Modern Art Museum of Luxembourg
2025, Ghosts Sheltering Under a Cloud of Entropy, Central Museum, Utrecht, the Netherlands
2023, Perpetual Inventory: An Exercise in Looking, The Third Line, UAE
2022-23, Plaited Time/Deep Water (with Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska),
Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE
2022, My Life in the Metaverse, co-curated by Heather Phillipson, Manarat Al Saadiyat,
Abu Dhabi Art
2021, Art in the Age of Anxiety, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE|
2014, Letters to Chelsea, Architectural Association, London, UK
2012, Whose Gaze Is It Anyway?, ICA London, UK
2012, Subversion, Cornerhouse, UK
PUBLICATIONS
Kholeifs art has been featured in publications such as The Happy Hypocrite (published by Bookworks, London), Portable Gray (published by University of Chicago Press), and Mousse Magazine.
COLLECTIONS
Kholeif's work is held in public and private collections, including the Collection of The Factory, Nairobi and Lamu, Kenya; the Collection of Sean Scully and Liliane Tomasko, Aix-en-Provence; the Zahid Collection, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, as well as in significant private collections in Lisbon, New York, Hamburg, Sharjah, London, Amsterdam, Glasgow, Los Angeles and Cape Town, among others.
SELECTED AUTHORED PUBLICATIONS
2026, Luísa Correia Pereira: World Child, Sternberg Press (forthcoming)
2025, Huguette Caland, imagine/otherwise series, Sternberg Press
2024, Nil Yalter: Circular Tension
2024, Otobong Nkanga: Stitched Dreams
2023, Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs, Phaidon
AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS
Churchill Fellowship
Grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation.
SELECTED CURATORIAL PROJECTS
2027, Dreamwork: Pictures from a House Museum in Exile, Reid and Garnethill Galleries, Glasgow School of Art
2026, Dreamwork: Ancestors Echo in the House of Tomorrow, Cáceres, Spain (opens 20 November 2026) in collaboration with MAAT - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon.
2024, Drawing Time, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE
2022, In the Heart of Another Country, Reichtorhallen, Hamburg
2021, Unsettled Objects, The Flying Saucer, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE
2019, Sharjah Biennial 14 (co-curator), Sharjah, UAE
2016, Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966), Whitechapel Gallery, London
2015, Two Days After Forever, Cyprus Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale, Italy
