Tabari is delighted to present a special preview of works from its second project with the award-winning artist, author and curator Omar Kholeif (born Cairo, Egypt; British Sudanese Egyptian).
Following the introduction of Kholeif’s textured anthropomorphic tricksters and landscapes in Fellow Travellers in Dubai, Tabari brings the artist to London, the city in which they live and work, at the historic address of Frieze, No.9 Cork Street, with Afterglow: From the Residue of the Departed Sun.
For this exhibition, Tabari has selected ten medium- to large-scale paintings made across the last decade from the artist’s series They Dreamt of Desert Rose. At once demure and enticingly sensuous, this body of work is an active negotiation with memory and its residue. The desert rose serves as an unofficial insignia for a native homeland the artist has not entered since 2013—once the condominium of Egypt and the Sudan under British rule, a nation that now exists for them only in story, in myth, and in the desire to absolve oneself of what it “buries in the skin”.
Painted in oil, at times with wax pigment and varnish, on linen and canvas, these works map a cartography in which we bear witness to movement—to constant departure.
Made at “the scale of my body”, as the artist notes, and begun after “a long illness”, the series was “part of another becoming of starting to build a nation, and a house museum for one and all, for our diaspora to dream in. I hope, like everything that I do, that it is a successful act of world-making.”
It is, indeed, a world of writing and storying, its tessellating forms drawing on African and Arab modernist histories. Each painting is presented in the artist’s own custom-designed tray frame and is accompanied by a unique work of lyric poetry, held, published voiced in the presence of the work of art.
