Dissolving Structures

RK: I think the tactility gives the objects another layer of meaning. This is the first time I’ve done metal casting, and there’s a contrast between the metal works and the fragility of the paper works, or the 3D prints. Some of the works feel heavy, or even have a melted feeling. Other pieces almost float. The encaustic paint on a lot of the surfaces gives everything a tactile presence. Painting the sculptures brings the work into a more complex space for me; colors have connotations, and I want to leave them for the viewer to interpret. Even the 3D-printed works are then hand painted.

IS: Yes, there’s a real feeling of physical touch both in the works and in the presence of them. The experience is deeply haptic. As viewers, we sense ourselves: looming over objects relatively vulnerable in scale, or standing outside spaces that we can’t physically enter. This installation includes a number of small works on a single pedestal, like a table in an architect’s studio. And yet, no matter the actual size, your work consistently carries the presence and concept of a model—a thinking object.

RK: All the pieces are models in some way or another, something the viewer can look at and then project themselves or their thoughts onto. A model is something we can imagine ourselves in, at a different scale. So the size of the model is not just its physical size, but also the size we imagine it being, if it were built. It has a virtual and actual scale.

IS: And with scale comes the body and its measure. How do we as viewers figure in this installation?

RK: The scale of the sculptures in this exhibition is closer to that of a body than a building. In one work, which consists of two sculptures with glass set in the middle, the viewer walks around it to experience it. The glass creates a superimposition of the two sculptures when looked at from a certain angle—a kind of a chimera that dissolves when you keep walking around it. This piece is a kind of a “trick,” where the focus is more on the illusion than the objects.

IS: The sculptures also have holes, or windows, that signal us to look into or through them.

RK: Yes, the holes are a theme, or a kind of language, that repeat throughout the show. They refer to a camera shutter, an eye, screen, frame, window—something to look through to something else. Untitled (Holes) could refer to a peep show or raree box—a 17th-century precursor to the magic lantern—and other protocinema devices. This piece leans against the wall so that you see the wall through its apertures; it doesn’t reveal an illusion, but the surface against which it leans. And the shadows create an additional space, or dimension, within the object.

IS: As a historical point of reference, you’ve talked about your interest in phantasmagoria, originally a Victorian form of entertainment, in which audiences are immersed in spectacular shadowy effects.

RK: I originally made the small works and paired them with other sculptures with glass in between to create the “superimpositions” I mentioned earlier. They create a projection of one object onto another that dissolves as you walk around it, and made me think of phantasmagoria and early film. Creating an illusion or a dream-like image was interesting to me. The reference to devices like the camera obscura becomes a conceptual element of these works. Some of the pieces, for example, look either like a wall façade with windows, or a film strip. I already mentioned the peep box. The objects are lit to create shadows. The aluminum floor piece for me is also like a shadow, a form that is cast on the ground in the way that a shadow is cast.

IS: “Dissolve” is another term that comes up. I like the idea of this installation making the cinematic dissolve something substantial. The term could also apply to the triangulated nature of your practice, in which sculpture, photography and film dissolve into one another.

RK: I’ve worked a lot with film, but by using film in a sculptural or architectural way, sometimes using mirrors or two-way mirrors, or looking through the projector to the film itself. I’ve also made “sets,” used in shoots and sometimes shown alongside the films, as a sculptural work, where the viewer is sometimes placed within the work to engage with the film and its set.

IS: There’s an “off-screen” element to this exhibition, too—a film you made and studied closely in the process of developing this new work.

RK: I wouldn’t say I studied it closely, but the works in the show do originate from a film I shot and a model of the house where it took place. I decided not to show the film because I wanted to focus on the sculpture, and keep it simple. The model was pulled apart and more or less destroyed, then reconfigured.

IS: In your work are the poetics of dissolve but also the politics of destruction. However abstractly, this exhibition makes us sentient to the current conditions of “home” in Ukraine and Palestine. It also relates to a monument you have been quietly building, the Untitled (Iraq Book Project), a project of collecting every article containing the words “Iraq,” “Iraqi” or “Baghdad” published since the start of the Iraq War in March 2003.

RK: The genesis of the Iraq Book Project was the horror of the war, and of witnessing it unfold. At the time, this was 2007, I was thinking about the war but also about its documentation in the press and online. I was interested in ideas of perception and how “facts” evolve and shift as they are communicated across differences of time and place. I compiled articles from both Western and Eastern newspapers—mostly Western because I didn’t have the ability to translate and search in Arabic, but I was able to use a few Arabic newspapers also published in English. The articles were reformatted so that the books looked like they were written as novels. There are no titles, and one article bleeds into the next. I thought I would keep going with it and, in theory, I could have—there are instructions that come with the piece—but after producing about eighty very large volumes, I stopped. The idea that it can keep going is part of it.

IS: The word “camera” means “chamber,” which makes “camera obscura” a dark room, needing only a pinhole of light to enter and produce an image. In the dark times of crisis in which we live, art can be that sliver of light.

Given the original project of this conversation—to explore some of the secrets hidden in plain sight of this mysterious exhibition—I wonder if we might discover in these sculptures as ruins a profound resiliency, even healing? In the process of breaking down, new constructions are revealed.

RK: The work’s references to ruins have a lot of connotations—the consequences of war, the remains of something ancient, or even something disintegrating, falling apart, in the present. These works lie somewhere between a ruin and a model: a model that is pulled apart in order make something.

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“Rachel Khedoori” is on view at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse, from 23 January through 23 May 2025.

Australia-born, Zurich-based artist Rachel Khedoori poses provocative phenomenological questions in her work that merges installation, sculpture, film and photography.

Curatorial Senior Director at Hauser & Wirth, Ingrid Schaffner is a curator, art critic, writer, and educator known for her generative and original scholarship focused on themes of archiving and collecting, photography, feminism, and alternate modernisms.