Fellow Travellers Curated by Dr Omar Kholeif: Tabari, DIFC
"Absence and conflict aside, these artists forged a specific kind of constitution—one that afforded new breath. They hold themselves close to the Earth. Wandering through sites of the imagination, they travelled across a myriad of trails and routes—tunnelling into a collective subconscious—one that is vivid, rich and abundant in its aesthetic possibilities.
Here, I present you with a fragment of what I call “dreamwork”—a form of social imagination arched around safeguarding aesthetic culture from the margins of history. Here, the diasporic imagination is reclaimed, illuminating the possibilities of shared movement—literal and metaphorical, exploring how it affects artistic method. Fellow Travellers is a parcel, a constitutive act of worlding, of dreaming.”
— Professor Omar Kholeif
Conceived and curated by artist, author and cultural historian Professor Omar Kholeif, Fellow Travellers asks how we might re-dream the routes, flows and counter-flows of modernity through the present. Bringing together Sonia Balassanian (b. 1942, Armenian-Iranian-American); Jai Chuhan (b. 1955, Punjab, India); Luísa Correia Pereira (1945–2009, Portuguese); Lalitha Lajmi (1932–2023, Indian); Irene Scheinmann (1933–2023, Iraqi-British) and Omar Kholeif (b. Cairo, Egypt) the exhibition traces artistic journeys across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, approaching movement as a generative space for kinship, memory and aesthetic exchange.
Developed from nearly two decades of Kholeif’s research, writing and relationships with artists, the exhibition brings landmark and rarely seen works into dialogue with Kholeif’s own paintings, presented under their own name for the first time. Here, painting is a connective thread through which diasporic histories, oral traditions, symbolic languages and forms of ancestral knowledge can be recovered and reimagined. The exhibition is accompanied by a limited-edition publication featuring original poetry and a curatorial essay.
The Artists
Working across painting, works on paper, watercolour, etching, and mixed media, the six artists of Fellow Travellers navigated social constraint, political upheaval and geographic rupture while pursuing rigorous aesthetic enquiry. The works on view were made on journeys outward from Baghdad and Tehran, across the Mediterranean and on to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans; Kolkata, Lisbon, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and New York each became a portal into the artists’ imagination.
Sonia Balassanian (b. 1942, Armenian-Iranian-American) established herself in the experimental milieu of 1970s New York, following studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Pratt Institute and the Whitney Independent Study Program, where Robert Rauschenberg was among her teachers. She became known as a pioneer of Lyrical Abstraction. Her large, textured paintings are built through a laboured process of underpainting and layering, producing forms that resemble calligraphy but cannot be read — at once an invitation to the viewer to invent their own lexicon, and a metaphor for a mother tongue soldered and remade in diaspora. Balassanian has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and SculptureCenter in New York, and at the Venice Biennale.
Jai Chuhan (b. 1955, Punjab, India; lives and works in London) moved to the United Kingdom as a child and trained at the Slade School of Fine Art. Working in oil on canvas and linen, she paints interiors in which female figures find breath, pause and air—rooms built from dense colour and constant negotiation, holding the psychological tension of the burden of representation against the tension of the paint itself. Kholeif describes her paintings as “arrangements in mood”: works that draw on antiquity as readily as on contemporary painting, with motifs that gesture towards Francis Bacon or Peter Doig.
Luísa Correia Pereira (1945–2009, Portuguese) is the subject of five years of archival research by Kholeif, and of a forthcoming monograph and touring museum presentation. On view is a group of rare large paintings on paper made in the 1970s while the artist was living in Paris, newly released by her Estate and never previously exhibited. Drawing on Heidegger’s notion of the fourfold, they propose a world in which the human and the celestial are joined, nature meeting the figure through whirling gesture and colour. They are shown alongside a large celestial painting from the 1980s that brings together Native American history, Brazilian ecological and Indigenous activism, and the desires of the subconscious.
Lalitha Lajmi (1932–2023, Indian) was a Kolkata-born painter and printmaker who grew up among performers and image-makers—sister to the filmmaker Guru Dutt and mother to the director Kalpana Lajmi—in a household where story, gesture and rhythm were everyday language. She is best known for panoramic watercolours in which every figure carries something of her own likeness. Drawn from the subconscious, these psychological scenes invite the viewer into a parcel of a life.
Irene Scheinmann, née Ruben Karady (1933–2023, Iraqi-British), is presented here for the first time in the Arabic-speaking world. Displaced from Baghdad to Britain, she compressed that distance into rock formations and curving horizons. Across paintings and works on paper, her landscapes open an ocular rift—a tense illusion between what the body knows and what the picture withholds.
Omar Kholeif (b. Cairo, Egypt) shows their paintings under their own name for the first time, in an installation conceived as a living tapestry. For over two decades, Kholeif has worked through avatars and heteronyms, treating painting as a form of writing: a way of preserving knowledge and returning stories from the margins to view. Abstract, lurid, body-like forms are assembled and disassembled into luminous colour fields that pull at latent memory and the wounds of historical trauma. Each painting, whatever its scale, is made over at least a year.
Professor Omar Kholeif is an artist, award-winning author, curator, cultural historian, broadcaster and museum director. Born in Cairo in the early 1980s to a family of actors, poets and community doctors, with firm Pan-Africanist ideals seeded in them by their Egyptian-Sudanese family, they began making art as a child as a way of reconciling a hybrid sense of self. Raised in Glasgow, familial dislocation led them to Los Angeles and then to Saudi Arabia; at seventeen they returned to Scotland and began preparatory studies at the Glasgow School of Art. They went on to study politics, film and fine art at the University of Glasgow, Edinburgh College of Art, Screen Academy Scotland, the Royal College of Art, the University of Reading and the Zurich University of the Arts.
Kholeif is Professor of Global Art Theory and Practice at the Glasgow School of Art, and has taught at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Hunter College, City University of New York. Their early moving-image works were broadcast on Channel 4 and the BBC, and their visual art has been profiled by British GQ, the New York Times and CNN. Their studio has been based in London since 2020
