Emotional Maps: Group Show at Lisson Gallery – Canvas
7 July 2025
When you look up the curator Dr Omar Kholeif online, he comes up as part-Sudanese, part-Egyptian. “I’m a British citizen and that’s the only passport I have,” he says. “Where is the context of the city that shaped me, that could conquer me, where I studied and lived, the place where art, artists and my mentors moved?” Kholeif frames his latest curatorial project – the group exhibition Finding My Blue Sky at Lisson Gallery – as a love letter to London, a city he has loved and loved in for over 20 years. The show is an emotional map, both charting and generating the “constellation” of lines along which Kholeif has worked, met and desired things and people here. He invites his audience to do the same: visualise their own maps of this complex city, with themselves as the compass.
On 12 May this year, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a “Plan for Change”. He promised to end the UK’s “failed experiment in open borders” with policies aimed at reducing immigration and including doubling the wait for naturalisation. It is the kind of masculine, tightening-fist, rightward move that is becoming ever more commonplace globally, and it runs counter to Kholeif’s ambitions at Lisson. His are deliberately soft, searching, poetic enquiries, one could even say feminine – more than 60 per cent of the artists in the show are women – and with a fluid, sensuous flow. They are brought together through the hundreds of tiny gossamer threads that web us into communities of immigrants, travellers and citizens, each and all dreaming of a satisfying click of belonging. Or a “blue sky” – so democratic, in that we all see it, and yet also utopic in that each of us always perceives something else.
Spanning both the gallery’s spaces (a short walk apart) in the Edgware Road area of northwest London, Finding My Blue Sky features more than 20 artists of different origins and generations, including Huguette Caland, Simone Fattal, Michael Rakowitz, Barbara Walker, Anuar Khalifi, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and Celia Hempton. The windows are entirely uncovered, baring the art to the street, which I have to walk on in order to experience the show in full. To Kholeif, Edgware Road is a microcosm of London’s – and the UK’s – plural modernity. With clouds of shisha cafes at one end to one of the UK’s largest private psychiatric hospitals at another, and from Oxbridge prep schools to the diverse Arabic-speaking community that lives locally, including some who have lived in the same social housing blocks since they were children. Edgware Road visibly prods us to accept how, in the postcolonial aftermath, this country has irreversibly changed. Lisson has never moved from the area in all its decades. When conceiving the show, Kholeif thought: “Why does the gallery not speak to the street?”
Continue reading Vamika Sinha's review for Canvas here.
