Books by Omar Kholeif

Goodbye, World!: Looking at Art in the Digital Age (Sternberg Press)

by Omar Kholeif

A look at how the internet and post-millenial technologies have transformed our ways of seeing and birthed a new form of culture.
The way we see the world has changed drastically since NASA released the “blue marble” image of the earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. No longer a placid slow-moving orb, the world is now perceived as a hothouse of activity and hyper-connectivity that cannot keep up with its inhabitants. The internet has collectively bound human society, replacing the world as the network of all networks. In Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age, writer and curator Omar Kholeif traces the birth of a culture propagated but also consumed by this digitized network. Has the internet transformed the way we see and relate to images? How has the field of perception been altered by evolving technologies, pervasive distribution, and our interaction with screens? How have artists working in diverse contexts, from eBay auctions to augmented reality, created new ways of emoting that are determined by these technologies? Focusing on a cultural and artistic landscape that has taken shape since the year 2000, Kholeif aims to put into context a new language for seeing, feeling, and being that has emerged through post-millennial technologies, and argues for a nuanced understanding of the post-digital condition. Taking cues from John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, this book—part memoir, part critical analysis—should prove essential for anyone interested in the changing world of the internet.

Making New Time: Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber

by Omar Kholeif

Celebrating Sharjah Biennial 14, this volume shows how artists respond to shifts of culture in an era of great social, political, and global change.

The Sharjah Biennial showcases a global perspective on contemporary art. In this book, artists respond to shifts in artmaking as material culture adapts to environmental destruction and climate change. It also explores how social, political, and technological change has altered the ways we exist in the world. Featuring the work of over thirty contemporary and modern artists, the book addresses perceptions of how history is told and re-told. It poses questions and provocations about the state of our existence through stories, poems, and essays.
Copublished by the Sharjah Art Foundation and DelMonico Books

Michael Rakowitz: Backstroke of the West

by Omar Kholeif

This first monograph of the acclaimed Iraqi-American artist, Michael Rakowitz, takes a historical, scholarly, and in-depth look at his politically charged work.

Michael Rakowitz's provocative and compelling multimedia projects confront American perceptions of Iraqi culture. Whether he's teaching students how to cook Iraqi food or recreating the thousands of items destroyed or stolen during the 2003 looting of the country's National Museum in Baghdad, Rakowitz is consistently working to address the trauma created by Saddam Hussein's regime and America's war on Iraq. This book explores ten of Rakowitz's most renowned works and one new project. The accompanying texts, drawings, and personal commentary offer a multi-faceted commentary on the artist's entire oeuvre. This book demonstrates art's ability to engage and confront the viewer and to generate greater understanding across cultural divides.

Published in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

I Was Raised on the Internet

by Omar Kholeif

Coinciding with a major exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, this anthology of essays and reflections casts a discursive and critical light on the work of artists engaging with the internet and digital technologies today.

Structured in three parts, I Was Raised on the Internet features critical essays, provocations, and manifestos, as well as images of new commissions for the accompanying exhibition. The book functions independently of the exhibition as a contribution to the knowledge of art and technology studies. Esteemed authors and creative practitioners - including Monira Al Qadiri, Jeremy Bailey, Zach Blas, James Bridle, Michael Connor, Lauren Cornell, Aria Dean, Simon Denny, DIS, Orit Gat, Omar Kholeif, Cadence Kinsey, Olia Lialina, Joanne McNeil, Trevor Paglen, Heather Phillipson, Jared Quinton, Martine Syms, Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, and Nina Wexelblatt - use the book as a jumping-off point to broaden the critical debate on art that engages with continually evolving digital technologies.
Copublished by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and DelMonico Books

Trevor Paglen (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

by Omar Kholeif, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Lauren Cornell

The first complete monograph on an artist whose work investigates surveillance and government secrecy in the digital age
Trevor Paglen's art gives visual geography to hidden forces, relentlessly pursuing what he calls the 'unseeable and undocumentable' in contemporary society. Blending photography, installation, investigative journalism, and science, Paglen explores the clandestine activity of government and intelligence agencies, using high-grade equipment to document their movements and reveal their hidden inner workings. This book presents over three decades of Paglen's groundbreaking work, making visible the structures and technologies that impact our lives.

Moving Image (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art)

by Omar Kholeif

An examination of the expanded field of moving image-based art that has emerged alongside digital media.
This anthology examines the expanded field of the moving image in recent art, tracing the genealogies of contemporary moving image work in performance, body art, experimental film, installation, and site-specific art from the 1960s to the present day. Contextualizing new developments made possible by advances in digital and networked technology, it locates contemporary practice within a global framework.
Among the issues it examines are how new technologies, forms of apparatus, and modes of editing or framing affect innovations in artistic practice and strategy; how work is defined by local contexts, and the tensions that can arise when the local is represented globally; how we define a 'third space' for the filmic image and whether an installation area can be abstracted from geography; how performance-based work in this field explores bodies as borders or territories; the ways in which political, pedagogical, and collective forms of practice have affected the moving image; and the new platforms and modes of viewing that are evolving in response to the globally distributed condition of contemporary media.
Artists surveyed include
Jananne al-Ani, Francis Alÿs, Yuri Ancarani, Oreet Ashery, Ed Atkins, Judith Barry, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Black Audio Film Collective, Brad Butler, Olga Chernysheva, James Coleman, Minerva Cuevas, Stan Douglas, Olafur Eliasson, VALIE EXPORT, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast, Morgan Fisher, Hollis Frampton, Melanie Gilligan, Joana Hadjithomas, Gary Hill, Susan Hiller, William Kentridge, Anja Kirschner, Steve McQueen, Jumana Manna, Karen Mirza, Rabih Mroué, Otolith Group, Nam June Paik, Luther Price, Yvonne Rainer, R.V. Ramani, Pipilotti Rist, Ben Rivers, Ryan Trecartin, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Bill Viola
Writers include
Robert Bird, Claire Bishop, Christa Blümlinger, Jonathan Crary, T.J. Demos, Jean Fisher, Tim Griffin, Andrew Grossman, Félix Guattari, Shanay Jhaveri, Sven Lütticken, Francesco Manacorda, H.G. Masters, Andrew V. Uroskie, Ian White, Maxa Zoller, Thomas Zummer

Imperfect Chronology: Arab Art from the Modern to the Contemporary Works from the Barjeel Art Foundation

by Omar Kholeif

Celebrating the Barjeel Art Foundation’s expansive collection, this book maps a genealogy of modern and contemporary Arab art and offers one of the most extensive presentations of modern Arab art.
Based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, the Barjeel Art Foundation was established to contribute to the development of the evolving art scene in the Arab region by building a prominent, publicly accessible art collection in the UAE. Over time it has grown to become one of the most holistic collections of Arab art, fostering critical dialogue around art practices both in the region and internationally. Coinciding with a year long series of exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, this unique overview features many rarely seen works by artists across the region from North Africa to the Gulf states as well as Western Asia. Spanning a period from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, this publication tells a striking visual story of artists who challenged notions of tradition, territory, and geography. Featuring more than 60 artists and over 100 works of art, along with essays by leading scholars, curators and artists such as, Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi , Kamal Boullata, Omar Kholeif, Rasha Salti, Nada Shabout, Gilane Tawadros and Ted McDonald-Toone.

Emily Jacir: Europa

by Omar Kholeif

This book offers one of the largest surveys of the work of artist Emily Jacir, known for her reflective works of art that are both extremely personal and acutely political. This book focuses on the award-winning artist’s relationship to Europe and the Mediterranean and explores how one relates to a particular place. Incorporating historic archival material,
Jacir traces Europe through its history of colonialism and trade
routes, reanimating it through performative gestures. Her work
offers uniquely personal revelations about Europe’s culture
of exile and surveillance, etymology and language, as well as
the tension between figuration and abstraction in art. Jacir
utilizes conceptual tools that reveal the political limitations of
society, creating scenarios that erode or question communal
boundaries and borders. The book includes reproductions of
Jacir’s works such as Material for a Film (2004–ongoing), which
won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, as well as stazione
(2009) and Lydda Airport (2009). It also includes original essay
contributions from Jean Fisher, Lorenzo Fusi, and Omar Kholeif,
among others.

Time, Forward!

by Omar Kholeif, Karen Sarkisov

Renowned contemporary artists and writers address the intersection of art, global politics, and emerging technologies.

Time, Forward! questions the notion and function of time and how it relates to the way we create and interact with art in the 21st century. Featuring newly commissioned works by an international group of artists, this book illuminates a broad range of responses to an exponentially accelerating world. This volume features a speculation on the future of the senses by Haroon Mirza, an unorthodox history of modernity by Walid Raad, and stills from a science fiction film by Rosa Barba. Provocative essays from scholars, critics, poets, and filmmakers probe issues as diverse as the role of sleep in a 24/7 capitalist society and artistic privacy and appropriation in cyberspace. Some of these artists ask us to press the pause button, others take us back in time, and still others push us forward into the realm of science fiction--only to reveal these fictions to be a form of everyday present reality.

Published with the V-A-C Foundation

The Artists Who Will Change the World

by Omar Kholeif

This cutting-edge book is the essential guide to what’s next in contemporary art, and to the visionaries who are making it happen.
Traditional histories of art have often been confined to a western European framework. But with the birth of contemporary museum culture, the proliferation of art fairs and biennials in regions far and wide, and the advent of digital technologies, new global networks have emerged, fostering a new world map of art, and paving the way for the art of tomorrow.
How do we engage with contemporary art in this global, ever-developing context? Senior Curator Omar Kholeif―a respected voice in contemporary art criticism―surveys the most influential figures and works in a series of concise, accessible entries.
The Artists Who Will Change the World is an introductory field guide to what the most urgent contemporary artists―Amalia Ulman, Lynette Yiadom Boakye, Hito Steyerl, and others―are producing worldwide. Whether engaging with the aesthetics of technology or the fluid world of politics, their work will influence generations of artists and art lovers to come. 200 illustrations in color