Finding My Blue Sky

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Souad Abdelrassoul, Sonia Balassanian, Huguette Caland, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Sarah Cunningham, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Simone Fattal, Hugh Hayden, Celia Hempton, Paul Heyer, Susan Hiller, Lubaina Himid, Leiko Ikemura, Anuar Khalifi, John Latham, Haroon Mirza, Otobong Nkanga, Luísa Correia Pereira, Laure Prouvost, Michael Rakowitz, Chelenge van Rampelberg, Hrair Sarkissian, Sean Scully, Gor Soudan, Magda Stawarska, Liliane Tomasko, Miko Veldkamp, Barbara Walker

Curated by Dr. Omar Kholeif

“Finding My Blue Sky is part of an ongoing journey of retreat and surrender. The context will be familiar to millions in search of a sense of longing and belonging—of home, of sacred space. The exhibition 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

Finding My Blue Sky is conceived as a constellation, at once epic and polyglot, personal and searchingly political. Curated by Dr. Omar Kholeif, this ambitious group exhibition brings together over thirty artists, showcasing more than one hundred works spanning five decades. Many of the participating artists are making their London debut, with several presenting newly commissioned pieces. The exhibition weaves together biographical and cultural differences, serving in part as a self-reflective statement—akin to a diary or memoir—shaped by Dr. Kholeif’s formative encounters with artists and informed by their own diasporic heritage. At the same time, it invites viewers to participate in the creation of meaning, encouraging them to imagine their own aesthetic politics. Accordingly, the show’s parallel title in Arabic has a distinct inflection: “What is the World that you Dream of?”

Spanning both London spaces, as well as courtyards, windows, and adjacent street corners, Finding My Blue Sky builds into a chorus of voices. The exhibition’s starting point is experienced on the corner of the street where one encounters Lubaina Himid’s enlarged Freedom Kanga paintings. One reads: “There Will Be an Endless Ocean”—a radical presence that connects the urban sprawl of the “present” with the liberation politics of the 1960s.

Inside the galleries, Polish-born British artist Magda Stawarska presents her most ambitious work to date: a multi-paneled dreamscape on copper and aluminum—a spectral gathering of portals developed through an intensive process of silk screen-printing, painting and sculpting, unfurling the ghosts. At the heart of 27 Bell Street, Lebanese French American artist Huguette Caland, who lived variously in Beirut, Paris and Los Angeles, blooms in full color with a salon of her works anchored by one of her historic works, Bribes de corps (Pink feeling blue), 1973. Its ocular dance cleaves to the bounce of artist Liliane Tomasko’s acrobatic painting.

The exhibition acts as a frame for several artists who remained under-appreciated during their lives, including Portuguese painter and poet Luísa Correia Pereira—whose paintings sublimated a queer sensibility into hard-edged color and fluid gesture. Pereira lived in Paris in the 1970s, at the same time as Caland, where both figures explored their interests—reflective of a larger feminist ethos—in deconstructing and transfiguring the body. The centrifugal design of the woodcarving Spiral Rhythm (1985–87) by Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair finds a counterpart, in a new ceramic work by Syrian Lebanese American sculptor Simone Fattal, depicting a coiled wave.

Sean Scully’s landmark Soft Ending (1969) stems from a transformative trip to Morocco and reminiscences of cotton drying in and around Marrakech and the Atlas Mountains. A similar confluence of formalist construction and emotional subcurrent is discernible in the works of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, an Iranian artist who emigrated to New York in 1944 and whose collection of folk artefacts profoundly shaped her practice.

Kholeif has conceptualized the 67 Lisson Street gallery as a spiritual site akin to ‘church,’ its displays suggesting a playful take on religious iconography and ritual. A new triptych by Spanish Moroccan painter Anuar Khalifi restages the Holy Trinity. The interplay of Christian and Islamic traditions is extended through various other allusions, whether to the chequerboard floors of northern European painting, or the shadowless designs of Arabesque miniatures. The curator took Lisson’s neighborhood as another key site of focus, explored in a suite of ambitious commissioned ‘Demolition’ paintings by Celia Hempton whose blue skies annotate every corner of the gallery. 

Finding My Blue Sky invites each viewer to assume the “my”; to claim the exhibition as their own; to cross the threshold between thought and feeling, combining a critical response with the urgings of memory and history. For Kholeif, their aspiration is: “An exhibition as pure expression of feeling. I have done this the only way that I know how—by invoking the voices of the artists that I have journeyed with, or vicariously through, over the years.”

The exhibition is complemented by a public programme of events, details of which can be found here.