Huguette Caland

An enchanting convening of texts and images, diaries and epistles celebrating a unique voice and ongoing dialogue around the erotics of art.

"The madness that spun me into Huguette Caland's art the first time around felt as if falling off a rollercoaster headfirst into a mountain of frosting. Surrendering to the sumptuous curve of pink hues, they gradually began to tessellate forming an orbit, a tender crossing of blue."

Lebanese-born artist, Huguette Caland (1931-2019) was a path-breaking figure in late modernism. The only daughter of the first Lebanese president, Bechara El Khoury, she produced a singular body of art that spanned media and continents. Working for more than five decades, her art is recognized for its embodied aesthetic and its unique sensuality.

In this searching critical biography, author and curator, Omar Kholeif, disentangles the seeming madness, velocity, and the interiority of Caland's life. ​​​​ Both an epistolary memoir and a biography, Kholeif interleaves the affective experience of encountering the artist over a period of 18 years, as readers are summoned on a journey through clouds of bristling color. Here, Caland's fields of light are set to lyric prose and poetry, fashioning a scene for looking at and experiencing the erotics of art anew.

Professor Dr. Omar Kholeif is an award-winning author, artist, curator, and cultural historian, and director of collections and senior curator at Sharjah Art Foundation, Govt. of Sharjah, UAE. Co-director and founder of the nonprofit artPost21, Kholeif is also a visiting professor in critical race, fine art, and creative industries at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art Research Unit, Teesside University, UK. Recent books include Nil Yalter: Circular Tension (2024), Otobong Nkanga: Stitched Dreams (2024), and Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs (2023).

Since 2005, Dr. Brigitte Caland has managed the estate of her mother Huguette Caland (1931-2019) and curated or co-curated several exhibitions of her work. For several years, she taught in the Arabic and Near Eastern languages department at the American University of Beirut (AUB).