Rachel Khedoori

23 January – 23 May 2025 

This January, the artist Rachel Khedoori will present an installation of new work in the second-floor of our Limmatstrasse gallery.

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.

^{Rachel Khedoori, Untitled (detail), 2024 © Rachel Khedoori}

Untitled (detail)

2024

Untitled

2024

About the Artist

Rachel Khedoori

Australia-born, Zurich-based artist Rachel Khedoori poses provocative phenomenological questions in her work that merges installation, sculpture, film and photography. Khedoori gained international recognition with her first comprehensive solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel and Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2001.

Khedoori is known for work that reinterprets the architecture of domestic spaces. She often reconstructs rooms that challenge viewers’ perceptual experience by interweaving mirrors, films and scale models into the installation. While the work is noticeably void of any representations of the figure, the viewer’s physical presence assumes the role of subject. Khedoori’s small-scale sculptures are often models, which serve as representations of imagined or hidden spaces. Khedoori’s use of the cinematic apparatus as a sculptural form, for example the 35mm film projector, emphasizes tensions at play within her practice. The work conflates or flattens the space between the physical, built environment and the illusory realm of film, suggesting that the distinction between reality and representation have become obscured. Khedoori also utilizes books, film, and photography to symbolize the act of documentation, encouraging viewers to reconsider the conditions of reportage and representation. Her work serves as a metaphor for the instability of memory and challenges viewers to reconsider the boundary between reality and imagination.

Learn more about this artist