An exploration into the wild and wonderful world of Luísa Correia Pereira (1945–2009), an obscure jewel of late modernism and "enfant terrible" of the Portuguese art scene.
Luísa Correia Pereira: World Child is a work of articulated fiction and art history. Luísa Correia Pereira (1945–2009), the "enfant terrible" of Portuguese painting, left Lisbon as a teenager for Rio de Janeiro and Paris, where a Gulbenkian fellowship and the mentorship of Júlio Pomar shaped an art of ladders, staircases, cacti, and tricksters. She returned with the Carnation Revolution of 1974, worked among the children of Trás-os-Montes, loved the poet and philosopher Cristiana Veiga Simão, was committed by her father to the Miguel Bombarda Hospital, and died in 2009.
Omar Kholeif recounts her story through two searchers: Blake, a museum director on the eve of retirement who buys a small watercolor and cannot let it go; and Mar, a graduate student who inherits Blake's research and walks a dead woman's streets in a dead man's footsteps. Letters from Luisa's cousin are interspersed between the chapters, recalling Paris in the spring of the revolution and the "uniform grey veil" induced by Correia Perreira's psychiatric medication.
With a foreword by the philosopher Maria Filomena Molder, and an interlude by Sarah Perks, this sixth and final volume of imagine/otherwise asks what it costs to be remembered and who does the labor of dreaming on an artist's behalf.
Imagine/otherwise presents critical biographies of underrepresented queer, non-binary, or female-identifying artists. Edited by Omar Kholeif, the series emphasizes the concept of "female worlding" with books that serve as field guides into previously unexplored, overlooked, or inaccessible artistic lives. The overall proposition of the series (to "imagine" a world "otherwise") stems from the desire to find a different way of writing and reading about art. Can art be examined unreservedly, unburdened of the limits imposed by the dominant hand of hegemony?
Current editorial advisors for the series include Skye Arundhati Thomas, Zoe Butt, Carla Chammas, Alison Hearst, and Sarah Perks.
Omar Kholeif (born in Cairo, lives and works in Chicago and London) is a writer, curator, editor, and broadcaster. He has written extensively on art in a global context, focusing on art that intersects with the Internet, as well as works of art from emerging geographic territories that have yet to be seen in the mainstream. He is the author and or editor of over two-dozen books and his writing has appeared in The Guardian, Wired, frieze, and Artforum, Mousse, among numerous publications. Media organs such as, The New York Times, BBC, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, The Economist, The Art Newspaper, Vice, The New Scientist, and others, have profiled his work.
