Omar Kholeif – författare

A leading figure in the world of networked culture explores the artists and events that defined the mass medium of our timeSince 1989, the year the World Wide Web was born, the art world has grappled with the rise of networked culture. This unprecedented survey of the artists and innovators in this area from 1989 to today is interwoven with the personal narrative of one of the leading voices on the digital world. In this book, Omar Kholeif, whose prolific career parallels the growth of the internet, tells the story of this mass medium and how it has fostered new possibilities for artists, both analog and digital.The book showcases work spanning a range of media from legendary artists including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Nam June Paik, Heather Phillipson, and Wu Tsang. Tracing the key artists and innovators from the emergence of browser-based art to the dawn of NFTs, this is a tale for the present and the future.

Travel from the monasteries of rural Armenia to the exhibition halls of MoMA in the first comprehensive monograph of Iranian American artist Sonia Balassanian.In this deeply personal portrait of Sonia Balassanian (b. 1942, Arak), an Iranian American artist of Armenian descent, author Dr. Omar Kholeif weaves together poetry, memoir, and historical anecdote to trace the contours of Balassanian’s world.With a career spanning more than five decades, Balassanian is known for her multidisciplinary, politically charged practice that spans painting, poetry, photography, video, installation, performance, and drawing. At the heart of her corpus are colorful, large-scale, lyrically abstract paintings that she began in the 1960s. In the 1980s, after she had moved to New York, her work took a political turn following the Iranian Revolution. Balassanian drew newfound attention for Hostages: A Diary (1980), an installation of drawings that mapped the experience of following the Iran hostage crisis from the United States, and for Cauterized Literature (1987), a mixed-media series of burnt books mounted on canvas that comments on censorship in Iran. Balassanian lives and works between New York and Armenia. This is the first comprehensive monograph of her art and life.Published by Sternberg Press in collaboration with artPost21

The story of Helen Khal and the artists who altered the course of modern and contemporary art in the Middle East and beyond.Helen Khal: Gallery One and Beirut in the 1960s is a reflective exhibition catalogue, part archive, as well as a living testament to the late Helen Khal (1923–2009). A polymath, artist, educator, and writer, Khal was also the cofounder of Gallery One, the first modern and contemporary art gallery in Lebanon, which opened its doors to the public in Beirut in 1963. This catalogue follows an exhibition initiated by Carla Chammas and curated by Chammas and Rachel Dedman as part of Home Works 8: A Forum on Cultural Practices, which opened its doors at the Sursock Museum, Beirut in October 2019. The exhibition, like the catalogue, detailed Helen’s life and practice as a catalytic lens through which to explore the work of a group of artists whom she was close to, in life and in art, including: Chafic Abboud, Yvette Achkar, Etel Adnan, Huguette Caland, Simone Fattal, Farid Haddad, Helen Khal, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Aref El Rayess, and Dorothy Salhab-Kazemi.From here, the publication seeks to address the exhibition’s themes of love, sex, and motherhood, the relationship between visual art and the literary landscape of 1960s and 1970s Beirut, and the galleries and studios in which public collaborations and private kinships were forged. Taking an intimate approach to a fabled period, Helen Khal: Gallery One and Beirut in the 1960s unfolds a rich picture of the friendships, connections, modes of exchange, common concerns, and differing approaches of some of the best-known and least-remembered artists of the mid-twentieth century in Lebanon.Copublished by artPost21

An exploration into the wild and wonderful world of Luísa Correia Pereira, an obscure jewel of late modernism and "énfant terrible" of the Portuguese art scene.“Portugal is not a place for women.”These words propelled the artist Paula Rego to pursue an English education, which informed her future career and subsequent legacy. How would life have looked for Luísa Correia Pereira had someone told her something similar in view of being a queer woman in the 1970s and 1980s? Born into one of Portugal’s aristocratic dynasties, Pereira shunned her family, propelled instead by a singular pursuit of her art. At seventeen, in 1962, she volunteered to work on the World Expo in Brazil where she became aware of poetry, cosmology, and biodiversity—all major influences on her work.Pereira then spent some time living with nuns at the Catholic Institute of Paris during the peak of the second-wave feminist movement, and studied library science, a field common to several women artists of the time. While working at the Foundation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris she developed her painting practice after receiving a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation. Here she was aided by the tutelage of the famed Portuguese artist Julio Pomar.Following the Carnation Revolution in 1974, Pereira returned to Portugal, where she experienced spells of recognition before falling into obscurity, partly due to episodes of manic depression. The press dubbed her an enfant terrible. She was renowned for being able to draw people into her orbit, then alienate them just as quicky—a habit that few realized was a consequence of her complex post-traumatic stress. The emotional topography of her life transpires in her early works on paper including watercolors, frottage, and collage, often depicting surrealist landscapes with distended bodies blanketed under thick washes of color. Her later canvases portrayed amorphous limbs strung together by ladders that would become a recurring motif for the rest of her working life.In this volume, author and cultural historian Dr. Omar Kholeif narrates a five-year journey through a collection of Correia Pereira’s works that variously speak, sing, and cry, returning us to a child of nature. Compiled from hundreds of hours of interviews during time spent in Portugal, France, and Brazil, this first monograph in English on the artist’s work and life is at once searing and heartwarming.Includes a foreword and essay by Maria Filomena Molder, an interlude by Sarah Perks, and an afterword by Sofia Victorino.Co-published by artPost21.

A look at how the internet and post-millenial technologies have transformed our ways of seeing and birthed a new form of culture.

The way we see the world has changed drastically since NASA released the “blue marble” image of the earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. No longer a placid slow-moving orb, the world is now perceived as a hothouse of activity and hyper-connectivity that cannot keep up with its inhabitants. The internet has collectively bound human society, replacing the world as the network of all networks. In Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age, writer and curator Omar Kholeif traces the birth of a culture propagated but also consumed by this digitized network. Has the internet transformed the way we see and relate to images? How has the field of perception been altered by evolving technologies, pervasive distribution, and our interaction with screens? How have artists working in diverse contexts, from eBay auctions to augmented reality, created new ways of emoting that are determined by these technologies? Focusing on a cultural and artistic landscape that has taken shape since the year 2000, Kholeif aims to put into context a new language for seeing, feeling, and being that has emerged through post-millennial technologies, and argues for a nuanced understanding of the post-digital condition. Taking cues from John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, this book—part memoir, part critical analysis—should prove essential for anyone interested in the changing world of the internet.

In this deeply personal account, author Omar Kholeif takes readers on a journey through the life and work of Nil Yalter—one of the pioneering artists of our time. Born in Cairo in 1938 and raised in Turkey, Yalter has lived in France since 1965. Over the course of six decades, the artist has created genre-expanding artistic projects across disciplines, innovating across both form and content regardless of the complex sociopolitical context that has surrounded her.Dr. Kholeif fuses the genres of auto/biography to unfurl a social and historical context that examines concepts of ethnicity, the diaspora, and feminism. Gender and sexuality are unbuckled, presenting a distinct picture of the changing cultural climate both in France and globally during the last century.