Untitled (red with belts)

Sahar Khoury (b. 1973 in Chicago, IL) lives and works in Oakland, CA. She was trained as an anthropologist and devoted the early part of her career to community-based research projects in Latinx migrant labor communities. Prior to pursuing formal artistic training, her art practice began in the context of her community-based work, in the late 1990s and 2000s in the Bay Area’s queer community, making works for concerts, performances, and protests. Khoury reflects on her years working with vulnerable populations, “Ethnography is a lot about observing the banal and the everyday and listening to it with a special sensitivity. I gravitate to the cheap and banal objects that are ubiquitous because I believe they have as much to tell me as a precious object in a vitrine in a museum. I am a strong believer that every object is political.

“My natural inclination is to make unity out of unlikely materials,” Khoury explains. “I am more interested in points of unity rather than purity; purity just doesn’t exist in my worldview.” Although meticulously crafted and structurally sound, her work often appears improvisatory and makeshift, incorporating industrial materials and discarded objects, such as animal cages, bed frames, and leather belts. Her work has come to include mediums as disparate as ceramic , cast bronze , papier-mâché, textile, cement, and blown glass. Her sculptures allude obliquely to architectural forms, such as screens, towers, gates, windows, and arches, as well as to monuments, but depleted of their grandeur.

Untitled (red with belts) typifies Khoury’s color palette of earth tones, reds, browns, and black, as well as her use of tightly tied and buckled leather belts to reinforce her constructions. The slabs and joints recall precedents in California ceramics, especially those of Peter Voulkos. The protruding elements in the metallic lower section can serve as handles for art handlers. The practical incorporation of pedestals, handles, hooks, and other utilitarian aspects into the work as formal elements is typical for Khoury. While serving to keep the individual parts of the sculpture fastened to one another, the taut belts also allude to fashion, design, and kink. In her work with these and other materials, such as pet cages, she describes how constraints can offer a sense of safety and survival but can also limit movement and freedom. For Khoury, these tensions and polarities relate both to the intimate realm of her own house pets and to the geopolitical histories and conflicts with which she is engaged.

Khoury’s Iranian mother and Jordanian-Palestinian father both fled their homelands to settle in the U.S. References to Middle Eastern culture and politics enter into her work in abstract ways. For example, sculpted hunks of kabob meat, pita bread, and sumac flowers dangle from some sculptures, while others incorporate a vat of Palestinian olive oil with a submerged neon tube silhouette of a camel. She has produced sculpture with sound elements, including recordings of the call and response of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum’s concerts. In some of her spindly ceramic sculptures, the parts are fastened together with cast bronze screw heads in the shape of falafel balls or dried limes, a staple of Persian cooking. Khoury sometimes incorporates numerals in cryptic sequences, which, when decoded, she explains, “mark nationality and memory formation in Iranian and Palestinian histories” such as 1948/1995 or 1953/1979. Other works bear the jumbled letters of deconstructed words such as “orientalism” and “colonial.”