Perpetual Inventory, Volume 1: An Exercise in Looking: Curated by Dr. Omar Kholeif

Myriad a mythology ensnares the trifling sphere of art and its making. Some refer to these space(s) as analogous to planetary or interstellar organisms. Sociologist Howard S. Becker famously sought to sketch out ‘art worlds’ of cooperation, while the entrepreneurially spirited post-millennials *might* refer to the ‘high’ aesthetic microcosm as an ‘art industry’. Both denominations smack of awkward perversity. In the context of the Gulf States, and its attendant cultural ecologies, the aesthetic field of the visual arts is principally infinitesimal—so minute that the diminutive matryoshka doll feels like an apt starting point to fashion an avatar of/for its worlding. 

Put the loathsome tabloid down, or better yet *try* to recycle it. From this Gulf to the globe, ‘art’ bears little comparison of scale with industries such as fashion and clothing, or the acquisition and connoisseurship of automobiles, interior furnishing, jewellery, or the colossi of tech, food, health, agriculture and construction. 

A parallel allegory can be drawn to a topography afield, but this geography is not a ‘world’ in that it does not self-sustain its constituents, nor does it necessarily nourish but a mere few. Enter a milieu of obfuscation—conceal with concealer and enter the beauty industrial complex where a history of art is made accessible to a self-selecting circle of aesthetically designated power brokers. These individuals are sometimes dimpled and tanned. They can be found in fine tailoring, occasionally bookended by loafers and transplanted hair, competitively sourced and stitched-in from a Turkish peninsula. 

The lips of elite human beings curl at the hushed whispers of intellect. Indeed, historical fact sullies the fabrications conjured from the egos of connoisseurs whose self-fulfilling prophecy is simply to be made manifest. Unclipped nose hairs protrude like pubes at the sight of these specimen—those designated as ‘curators’—the holier than thou paupers who masquerade in economic dwellings, seemingly placated by simple pleasures gleaned through their aesthetic senses. 

The refined aesthete, it is assumed, possesses distinguishing insights that fashion national collections, broker communal tastes, presenting exhibitions for the commons. Their happiness is performed live, reaching its audience through hashtags, meticulously placed across social media platforms. 

A grimace emerges from the gallery of curators waiting to descend from the galleys into a swollen shell of sweet bitter. No hired tuxedo or meal supplement can compensate them for the decades of being portrayed as purveyors of intangible privilege. Rubbing coins together simply to scrape into the historical canon, holding favour by enacting their hyper-specialised knowledge for festooned groups of people, always but barely for a form of minimum wage. 

One curator shrieks, refusing to jump ship, ‘curate the power out of me’. The shackled coterie of neurotic intelligentsia begins to chant and plead in unison. White masks pull back, revealing green mould—hallowed CHEEK-bones. But for a spectral shimmer that transpires, unsettling the rickety dust-laden archives where aesthetic life is anthologised. 

It is in the nook, the crevice of industrial zones and government buildings that the embodied process of storytelling re-emerged for this author—me, I, them. During what now felt like unceasing time—in the lockdowns of 2020, the moths became friends. The dutiful task of work presented itself in epic style through the disassembling of containers, boxes and crates. Undoing—not in a philosophical sense, but in functional essence began a new set of convenings. A form of authorship that could only take shape outside the bounds of a hyper-scheduled professional life. 

Instead, the act of scanning, photographing, annotating, indexing, reporting and assessing, constellated a set of pleasures that were seemingly alien. To bring to sight that which was sleeping, to a form of wakefulness, became a contingent part of daily existence. Rosalind Krauss’s proclamation that a critic should continue to take ‘perpetual inventory’ emerged as a thought bubble. The ensuing time stirred this mortal coil into states of anxious awakening. For the curator, the museum director, the archivist, the storyteller, too, must renegotiate the epistemic structures that inform their institutions. The act of worldbuilding is thus articulated through accumulated, lived experience. 

This is no ordinary post-modern affair, but a contemporary, ever-present state, where knowledge is developed through the interpolation of feeling—the affective possibilities developed as a result of constant doing. The labour-intensive function of the practicum, although the object of scorn in some seats of the academy, has forged possibilities for the spectator seeking to decode the experience of not merely expressing, but also, of enacting, knowledge. The clustering of years of repetitive skillsets— the very practice of artmaking, enables one with, to invoke the late Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, a hexagonal disposition. Refractive and reflective epistemes emerge from the thick of the body—qualifying perspectives beyond the inner/outer, in favour, of a multi-directional view—a meta-consciousness that is unbounded, uncontainable. 

With exhibition sites temporarily closed, the virtual showroom, i.e., one’s stasis—their inventory was made visible to me in seeming infinitum—as pdf documents, or password protected URLs, as well as through 3D animated digital rendering. The seeds of a project were borne by a web application dangled in front of me by an insurance appraiser. As I watched her scroll through a database on her mobile device, a picture of a picture—of a hearse by the artist, Fouad Elkoury captured my attention. It was summoning me into a portal, a country of possible composition. It served as an invitation to employ the exploratory act of looking, tangentially. The invocation of André Malraux’s ‘imaginary museum’ aka the ‘museum without walls’, Benjamin and Berger, Didion, Sontag; the advent of the printing press, broadcast television, streaming and the potentialities of reproducible imagery, all lay as latent referents. 

Lay as in laid to rest—a rousing act of reanimation awaited. In the brimming cells of a storage unit in Alserkal avenue, the foundations of the first chapter in this searching act was to begin, Perpetual Inventory, Volume 1: An Exercise in Looking. The exercise as it were, was to assemble an iconology of the last twenty years through culturally situated, extant art and artifact. Elkoury’s hearse ushered me to a mushrooming canvas ensconced in bubble wrap by Anuar Khalifi—a vortex eschewing Elkoury’s pyramid of death into a vessel for transcendence. I considered the concept of alterity in the days between, as I examined the pages of Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, Kodwo Eshun, and Greg Tate. Was this an exercise in queering a gaze that was already askew? 

A shelled building, a ruin, meets the sky, in piercing light. Again, Fouad Elkoury’s photographs beckoned. Through the threshold, a memento mori awaited. Nostalgia was not a dirty word here. A hand-painted self-portrait of the artist Youssef Nabil by a fireplace, an uncharacteristic scene by the late Shirin Aliabadi, a transgenerational diptych in black and white by Arwa Abouon, a set of instructions by Hayv Kahraman, pave a path in and out of order, rupturing the politeness of a single aesthetic gesture. A series of trophies await us by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, an album of memory languages crafted and grafted by Hassan Hajjaj sits atop a staircase. From above and below, landscapes—stitched and woven, by Jordan Nasser and Tarek Al-Ghoussein, among many others, herald one through a corridor of one’s own imagining. Exit stage left and you will find yourself in consumer heaven, with art and artists. A souvenir, your keepsake, is our remembrance. 

For Frank Gallacher, always.

Inquire

They used to SAY 

One Day they’d make a movie of you!

They used to Say: 

One Day they’d make a movie about you. 

I used to believe that one they 

were gonna make a movie about me. 

  ! 

       feel like

I have been blown to

smithereens

(after HP Sauce)

Zanzibar, again. 

(after Lubaina Himid)

Painting—a commemoration 

An exercise in speed, daring, calm and panic

They wonder: Will the next journey be easier?

Women’s tears fill oceans

Shutters only hide the sun

The Rich Women of Zurich are summoning

Rainbow clearance

They say that humour makes art accessible

But I see jesting as a kind of metal handkerchief

Bitter-sweet cries that sweeten the bitter

Tongues that blossom

Letter artifacts

Stained, not charred

Aftersun

(For Magda)

As human offspring

we succumb to kinds of knowing

That we will, shall, will, never be able to enter their minds

the inner lives

of fathers, or mothers

Belonging clinks, the longing 

A Rosewater Sprinkle

A night of force-fed lovemaking

Thorns smudge my head—

A Philharmonic Orchestra

Processes

minutes and minutes of listening, and just 

Rainfall sutures the pain

How does one dissemble a palimpsest?

where does it begin and end?

Is this my luggage to carry?

My luggage to bear burden?

Shall, will, there be a moment when I am no longer carrying someone else’s baggage?

A sub_strata//

dreams of possible present

No future, they say

The Revenge for a lifetime without a mother

In the prison of a father

A Quicktime file, loops.

On Solid Ground

Each came with a pre-figured line out of a movie

A Magic Trick unspooled from a pocket

Right before

Bust & Run

‘I feel like we’re just stealing time’

Was this haram act of back and forth—

Going to dissipate 

Just Because the laws of the land did not sanction this?

The first ‘One’

Used pithy phrasing

Pulled from the book of trite 

He ate too many Corn Dogs—

‘One Day, you’ll leave me for the world!’

A phrase to be howled

Thump, Crackle and Bang

Me and my wheelie bag sleep on in-land pavements

This is a Bomb—the Luring Love Test

The words stick to me, superglued

Outstretched on two-hundred-year-old wood floor,

Termite dust floating like embers

Windows shuttered

Doors bolted and bolted,

The Rites of Solitary 

Alive with the Ghouls

Total Recall

ENTER the Nostalgia Police

You should have never said ‘NO’. 

Poetry of Contagion (2021)

The future is hearsay, or is it Heresy

A new variant

An active protein that manifests from in-between the seams?

Searching for an exit sign

The wounds are as bulbous

As the Cloud

The Infinity Engine

Rebooting in the African desert

AWS`

A locomotive soaked in honey

A pile of Muck

A Bronchial murmur

Native-immigrants, forever

Hollowed of Knowing

Updating weaker

“Update Slacker”

Nomadlands

Everyone’s land

No one’s land

The Father, the Dissident, The Jester, The Creep

US: You and Me and Everyone We Know

Bird after Bird

Travel down identified routes

Extinct on arrival O’clock

There are no more O’clocks

Scat

Till you are nothing but a dreg

Voided

A couple of cents left on a balance sheet

Baby poems

Surrogate children

Filling in for wounds that cannot be sutured

A cosmo-sphere in waiting

Ascending, transcendence

Wanton Science, without fiction

The contours are different

this time

The sleepy ape-shaped animal has woken from their long stupor

Emerging from the rattling cage 

From the dormant waters

Only one aim in sight

Universal take-over

There’s a Mood

In the air 

Melancholy’s sister 

A beautiful weight 

With eyes as piercing as the sun’s 

Never let it go

Never let it go

Never let me go

DARE

Langston Hughes

Let Darkness

Gather up its roses

Cupping softness in the hand

Till the hard fist

Of sunshine

Dares the dark

To stand 

Dr Omar Kholeif CF FRSA aka Dr. O is an author of prose and poetry, a historian of the academy and its peripheries and a curator of vanquished and suppressed archives. They have worked as a broadcaster, filmmaker, editor, publisher, and museum director. Over the last two decades, their work has concentrated on the evolving nature of networked image culture in relation to intersectional questions emerging in the field and study of ethnicity, race, and gender. Their lines of inquiry have come to life in over 60 exhibitions, and in nearly 40 authored, co-authored, and/or edited books, which have been translated into 12 languages. Dr. Kholeif was co-curator of Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber and currently serves as Director of Collections and Senior Curator, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE. Their much-anticipated monograph, Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs is published by Phaidon in early 2023, www.phaidon.com/internetart. 

Visit: www.omarkholeif.com.

This exhibition is realised in collaboration with artPost21.

This is an 

production