Mudam Talk with Omar Kholeif and Evi Vingerling

In the framework of the exhibition: Lubaina Himid & Magda Stawarska: Nets for Night and Day

In English

Participation fee: 10€

Free for students and Kulturpass

Booking required:

mudam.com/rsvp-artist-talk

The Dreamwork: A Journey of Women's Voices



From the evening sky, we will descend to a darkened auditorium, where myths are explored, disentangled and reborn. A soprano – reaching for the stars – her voice once lost to time, will rise from the ocean and be found in a vessel of memory.

What does listening to the female voice do to the listener? And what does the embodied experience of singing do for the performer?

In this new lecture-performance, Egyptian-born, British-Sudanese curator, writer and poet Omar Kholeif, together with Dutch-American artist and educator Evi Vingerling, has devised a journey to retrieve women’s voices that have been lost to the past. Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska’s installation Zanzibar (1997–2023) acts as a springboard into The Dreamwork space.

Over the course of their convening, the duo will present live readings; trails of correspondence and poetry; and archival pictures, video clips and live songs that explore how the personal archive fashions collective memory.

The various shapes friendship may take are explored through tales of pirates and sirens, Aboriginal art and Dreaming, the smells of city streets from Lisbon to Sharjah, the loss of certain sensations and the realisation of others. To whom it may concern – to you, the audience – this is a ballad shared among women who choose to imagine the world otherwise.

The Dreamwork forms part of an ongoing exploration developed within the book series imagine/otherwise, published by Sternberg Press and artPost 21.

Biographies:

Professor Omar Kholeif, PhD, is an award-winning author, artist and historian of visual culture – as well as the avatar of Doctor O – Pop Physician and the heteronym of several non-Portuguese poets. They are the founder and principal of artPost21, a not-for-profit cultural agency, publishing house and collection that explores art and culture at the margins of society. Since 2018, they have served as the director of collections and senior curator, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE. They previously served as Manilow senior curator and director of global initiatives at the MCA Chicago; curator at Whitechapel Gallery, London; senior curator of Cornerhouse, Manchester and FACT, Liverpool. Longtime trustee and former programme director of SPACE, London, they are ambassador for Mental Health Research UK and visiting research professor at the School of Arts & the Creative industries at MIMA Research Institute, Teesside University, UK.

Evi Vingerling lives and works in the Netherlands. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and former resident at the Rijksakademie, she received the Royal Award for Modern Painting in 2012. Her work is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide. Her two-person exhibition, Light on Things, with Katja Mater, developed in dialogue with Kholeif's poetry, is on view until 26 October at Landhuis Oud Amelisweerd, Utrecht, organized by Utrecht Centraal Museum and the Hartwig Art Foundation.