Curator Dr. Omar Kholeif walks through 'Finding My Blue Sky' at Lisson Gallery London
27 June 2025
“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 thirty intergenerational artists whose work has been brought together from around the globe, wrapping around both of the Gallery's London spaces, its courtyards, as well as the street.
A number of significant art historical figures are making their London debut, alongside the presentation of new commissions from over 12 of the featured artists.
Finding my Blue Sky is an invitation to embrace the biographical and cultural nuances that make humans different—the overlapping details found in personal narratives: it is at one level a self-reflective statement, akin to a diary or memoir, evolving out of Kholeif’s formative interactions and evolving encounters with artists, narrated through lived experience.
Developed as a conversation with the urban sphere surrounding the gallery, the exhibition celebrates the diasporic experience, arguing that nomadism can encapsulate an embodied space of tender and loving kinship.
At another level, it invites the viewer to participate in the creation of meaning – to dream of their own aesthetic politics—of their own pursuit of feeling. Accordingly, the parallel title in Arabic has a distinct inflection: “What is the World that you Dream of?”
Film by Laura Bushell.