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In this episode, Tabari gets to know Dr Omar Kholeif, also known to the world as Doctor O, the Pop Physician, the curator of more than a hundred exhibitions, the author of over two dozen books, and Professor of Global Art Theory and Practice at the Glasgow School of Art, where they now also lead the Master's in Curatorial Practice. The terrain is rich. The conversation moves through Omar’s approach to curation as a form of worldmaking and the magic of the gallery's collaboration with them.
Omar chats to us about the recoveries, the discoveries, the artists pulled gently or insistently into the light. The late Iraqi-British modernist Irene Scheinmann, whose estate the gallery now represents, is one such recovery. There are others. Fellow Travellers, the curated group exhibition coming to Tabari, is the centre of the conversation, a show built around the artists Omar has spent decades dreaming with, working with, and learning from, the artists with whom they share what they call dreamwork: a form of social imagination concerned with safeguarding diasporic and marginalised aesthetic cultures. These are artists Omar has known for years whose practices have ignited their thinking. Among them, the unrepeatable Simone Fattal, the Damascene painter, sculptor and publisher, with whom Omar shares a decades-long bond and whose volume in their imagine/otherwise series remains among the most loved of that landmark imprint. They speak about inner spaces, about the long ideas exchange that becomes a friendship and the longer friendship that becomes a body of curatorial thought.
Tabari is delighted to welcome Dr Omar Kholeif to the podcast.