Radhika Khimji is one of the artists exhibiting at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022 in Oman and one of the key exhibitors at Art Dubai 2022. Born in Muscat in 1979, Khimji lives and works in Muscat and London, where she studied at the Slade School of Art in London (2002), the Royal College of Art (2005) and University College London (2007), and has created and exhibited her work in cities such as Barka, New York, New Delhi, Mumbai, Vienna and Beirut. Radhika Khimji's work combines elements of drawing, color, sculpture, collage, photography and embroidery, resulting in works that often carry some allusion to the body and occupy overlapping spaces between different media. A preoccupied contemplation of Orientalism, Middle Eastern heritage, expressing the fluidity and ephemerality of the body and the relationship between body and space, becomes central to her creations. Such works also form a protest - against stereotypes and the commodification of cultural identity. "I am not portraying a body as it is, but looking for the feeling of the act in the body, and the discomfort and space it is in."
"Safe Landings, the first solo exhibition in 2010 in her hometown of Barka Castle, features the Shifters series, which has been representative of her work since the turn of the century. "Shifters" also means incisions. Khimji fuses painting and sculpture to create freestanding, hollowed-out, anthropomorphic models cut from plywood and Plexiglas, on which she draws mesh patterns resembling skin, muscle and bone. These vague, semi-abstract creations have human legs and twisted torsos, and perform a variety of simple or laborious gestures from standing to crouching. They are not constrained by pure categorization, but lie outside the boundaries of fixed or imposed identities, as she explains, "Cultural networks make these bodily gestures easy to understand and read, and I have discovered a language that can play with and evade them."

In the past few years, Khimji has continued to experiment with new materials, and The dangler (2008), one of her early works in the exhibition Adorning Shadows, is a three-meter-high white aluminum plate suspended from the ceiling with irregular holes from the center to the edges. In 2017, for her solo exhibition Becoming Landscape in Vienna, Khimji introduced the medium of photographs. In "It's a deep dark floating" and "Rust in the System," she drew opaque human silhouettes on photographs taken at a construction site in Oman. In this work, Khimji deepens her research around the inherent relationship between space, gesture, and anthropomorphic construction, revisiting the notion of belonging in a landscape where individual identity and gender are implied. The Great Escape, created in 2018, on the other hand, consists of a wooden panel and stacked knitted fabric providing the backdrop and frame for a red triangular pattern of small, intricate dots above a blurred gray architectural landscape in the distance. The use of dots to create gestures has become a common language in Khimji's work, both in the brush and in the perforations on the surface.

>（The Great Escape），2018

>（OH ME, MY ROCK），2021

>（Horizontal Right），2010

>（Safe Landings），2010

>（Safe Landings），2010

>（Shifters） Series

>（Rust in the System），2017

>（It’s a deep dark floating），2017

Radhika Khimji

"Once you stop working, any explanation or description is like a lie, because they are process-based, an act done out of compulsion." Khimji's work at this stage of her life has no fixed schedule; everything is created in the studio, and it is a different life when she steps outside. The architectural space has a unique meaning for her, as the architectural elements provide the stage for the free dance of the body, and the space through which body awareness and inner vulnerability occur. Khimji is particularly interested in the construction site, as it is a temporary place in the process of events, containing the building blocks that make up the city, and when the process is over, all objects immediately become matter and memory. In her work "The Great Escape", Khimji uses collage, she uses a lot of pencils to trace the outlines of the buildings, making the image dirty, and then cutting it out and gluing it to the wooden panels, the rectangle of which is subsequently broken, leaving these broken walls to find their own background.
Khimji's way of working, that is, through the materiality and deconstruction of materiality in the creative process to escape and erase the formed identity structure, generates a new narrative for the object, thus extracting it from its historical identity, and because his works seem to originate from identity itself, the more he tries to escape the classification, the more he finds himself bound in it. As each individual has its own place, the quest to subvert the formalization of identity becomes a displaced endeavor, but the pursuit of a kaleidoscope of changing possibilities remains inexhaustibly motivating.
In the freshwater lakes of the Amanhagar Mountains grows a thin, indistinguishable fish with normal eyesight as juveniles, but as adults, they gradually lose their sight as a layer of skin grows over their eyes. This blind fish attracts thousands of visitors each year to the dark caves, where men in robes and women in veils follow the guidance of electric lights inch by inch, gazing into the dark waters. And for Radhika Khimji, the challenge in the caves is less about discovering blind fish and more about imagining their world.

Article Resource: 艺术与设计

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