KASSEL, Germany — Can the unvarnished, empty space of unoccupied architecture and the emotionless architectural line, with its ghostly presence, provide an intimate experience of human trace? Can tectonic structures be witness to our longing for communication and stability? Toba Khedoori’s survey exhibition poses these questions as it offers sensual relief in our pandemic times.
Despite her international success, Toba Khedoori at the Fridericianum is the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. Curated by Fridericianum director Moritz Wesseler, along with Alexandra Sommer and Julia Schleis, it presents a grand survey of graphic and painterly images by the artist created between 1994 and 2021.
It opens with a prelude in the museum’s rotunda: three black and white photographs of the artist by her twin sister, Rachel Khedoori, also an internationally renowned artist. These portraits, from 1995, show Toba Khedoori with her back to the camera, standing on a ladder as she works on a nine-meter-long drawing in her Los Angeles apartment. The focus on the architectural space and utilitarian tool — the ladder — reflects Khedoori’s own artwork, while the photograph as a medium, which Roland Barthes has proclaimed famously as a trace itself, can be seen as symbolic of her work’s subtler qualities. Toba Khedoori’s monumental images depict decontextualized architectural-spatial fragments and details of nature’s formations, in which the trace becomes a major feature.
Entering the exhibition’s first room the visitor is confronted with three artworks, which depict a window looking into darkness; a long walkway; and a wooden stick along with its shadow. In its simplicity, this room holds the key aspects of Khedoori’s work, as well as essential categories of painting and drawing in general. First, the artwork as a “window to the world,” as it has been widely described since Leon Battista Alberti — only in this case the viewer looks at a black monochrome instead, revealing its density and color variation. In the image of the long walkway, the artist develops the concept of perspective, while the wooden stick focuses on volumetric representation.
Perspective, depth, and color are at play in all of Khedoori’s works made between 1993 and 2021. Since 2008 her formats have become considerably smaller, her depictions more colorful and more photographic, but they still share this interest. They speak to us about their metaphorical qualities, too, of a window as an image, a cipher, a form of communication. Khedoori’s work has often been divided into “early” (through 2007) and “late” (2008 on) periods in exhibition and catalogue narratives, which can come across as simplistic. Here, though, this temporal division contributes to the viewer’s understanding by uncovering similarities as well as differences.