Finding my blue curated by Dr Omar Kholeif

“The show is my love-letter to London, a city that I have continually returned to over the last four decades. It is a journey of retreat and surrender that will be familiar to millions in search of a sense of longing and belonging — of home, of sacred space. Finding My Blue Sky invites spectators to indulge in the sensuous curve of artistic endeavors that exist in their own culturally situated space of dreaming—one that allows us to sketch myriad possible routes to modernity, and with this, new ways of looking altogether.” – Omar Kholeif, PhD, curator of Finding My Blue Sky

Finding My Blue Sky is an exhibition conceived as a constellation, at once epic and polyglot, personal and searchingly political. Curated by Dr. Omar Kholeif, this ambitious group show at Lisson Gallery features over twenty artists from diverse nationalities and eras, including several making their London debut, alongside twelve new commissions. The show elides biographical and cultural difference in overlapping personal narratives: it is at one level a self-reflexive statement, akin to a diary or memoir, evolving out of Kholeif’s formative interactions and new encounters with artists, and his own diasporic heritage (as the son of Egyptian and Sudanese parents). At another, it invites viewers to participate in the creation of meaning – to dream of their own aesthetic politics. Accordingly, the parallel title in Arabic has a distinct inflection: “What is the World that you Dream of?”