Artist: Rachel Khedoori

This January, the artist Rachel Khedoori presents an installation of new work in the second-floor gallery of Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse. Over the course of a career spanning 30 years, Khedoori has worked in various mediums—film, sculpture and installation to reinterpret space and challenge perception through the discrete displacement of her mediums, materials and forms.

For her new work in Zurich, Khedoori has applied a range of materials and techniques—cast aluminum, bronze, 3-D printing, resin, encaustic paint and paper—to produce an ensemble of sculptural works that oscillate between constructed and deconstructed states. The works on view form an interconnected vocabulary, consisting of various compositions of flat forms that evoke facades of buildings or camera shutters. Some are placed in front of glass panes and lit to produce shadows and reflections, referencing early magic lanterns. Models of rooms are stacked to become towers or collapsed structures or reduced to flattened planes on the floor. Tall rectangular sheets of resin coated paper with window cutouts recall hanging film strips as well as the facade of a building falling apart and flattened into a two-dimensional state. All of the works incorporate frames or windows that the viewer can look through. A large stack of resin-coated sheets of paper, punched through with holes of decreasing width, leans against a wall, evoking an early modern peep box. Resembling ruins, everything seems to be in the process of slow deterioration—of becoming new by breaking down.

Khedoori’s new ensemble of works oscillates between solidity and fragility, materiality and immateriality. By simple means, Khedoori imbues her static material sculptures with other perceptual or sensory modes. The use of shadows and reflections in some of the works invoke the illusionary realm of film by doubling and splitting the viewer’s perception of their own movement around the work. The translucent surfaces of the encaustic and resin-coated works allow their forms to dissolve into luminescence. Eluding categorization as either abstraction and representation, the perceptual and conceptual ambivalence of these works pulls the viewer into the uncanny space of self-reflexive thought or poetry.

About the artist
Rachel Khedoori (born 1964 in Sydney, Australia; lives in Zürich) earned her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Since her first comprehensive solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel and Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2001 gained her international recognition, Khedoori has shown widely in group and solo presentations. In 2008, she embarked on the monumental ‘Untitled (Iraq Book Project),’ which undertakes to collect every article containing the words ‘Iraq,’ ‘Iraqi,’ or ‘Baghdad’ to be published since the start of the Iraq War in March 2003; when presented at MoMA P.S.1 in 2019, the project numbered 70 volumes. Most recently, Khedoori is featured in ‘Great Women Sculptors’ a comprehensive reference from Phaidon Press (2024).