I first met Toba Khedoori when she was a graduate student in the MFA program at the University of California in Los Angeles. I was an undergraduate at the same university, hesitating between majors. I remember being both captivated and disoriented by her work when I first saw it. The elements of her paintings, like the words in a poem, were familiar to me. Yet in their composition and interaction, they acquired an ambiguous form of estrangement. Khedoori covers the large sheets of paper that she habitually paints on with wax, turning them into a palimpsest that retains and embalms the incidental traces of her activity. Her renderings often float against an absence of background, context, or place. Whereas the works of many of her contemporaries are relentlessly framed by texts and paratexts, Khedoori’s paintings are made all the more eloquent by the self-effacement of their author.
Since then, I have kept looking, thinking, and occasionally writing about her work. My relationship to it has evolved, but in a curious manner. The artist, who is Australian-born and of Iraqi descent, creates paintings that lead me back to that initial feeling of interrogation, meaning to question in between, from within the space of an interval. Certain artworks or bodies of work require additional information, or address themselves to external ideas.
In Khedoori’s case, it is instead one’s own knowledge, habits, and preconceptions that are called into question. The intensity of her work’s interrogation has not waned for me over time, but has instead deepened and become more acute, adapting and responding to the shifts and evolutions in my thinking.
The first work that one sees upon entering her current exhibition—which is on view at the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany, until February 20, 2022—is “Untitled (window)” (1999). It consists of three large sheets of paper, stapled to the wall. A precisely rendered window adorns the central sheet, not quite in the middle of the paper, but slightly off-center. The two additional pieces of paper have been left unmarked, except for a layer of wax. The glass of the window has been painted an opaque indigo, bordering on black. As we can no longer look through its virtual panes, we are left to gaze at the window itself, its frame and structure. The painting allows us to look at something we normally only look through, imbuing it with an active presence. Moreover, the work is accompanied only by the most literal of titles. Toba Khedoori is not an artist who surrounds her works with language, turning them into vehicles for ideas, intentions, or positions. The task of interpretation is left strictly to the viewer.