Becoming Landscape was a solo exhibition at Krinzinger Projekte in Vienna running from the 5th of July to the 1st of September 2017. The works were produced during a two-month residency in Vienna.
This new body of multi-media works deepens her studies into anthropomorphic structures, the visceral relationship we have to landscape, and our connection with the living and constructed bodies that unceasingly surround us.
Khimji has deepened her dialogue between spaces and people, producing a series of living shapes at varying scales. Her work is at once deeply intimate and detailed, evoking an immediate self-awareness in the viewer. As Khimji began to develop these forms during her residency she described them as, “silhouettes that become landscapes”, juxtaposing construction and building centres with suggestions and shapes of the female body. As viewers, we are shown fragments and snapshots of public sphere, simultaneously suggesting intonations of the most private parts of oneself.
Khimji re-examines ideas of ownership within the personalised and implicitly gendered landscape, and the varied ownerships one stakes on a place, leaving the bodily landscape forms vulnerable to invasion and capture. This exhibition deepens her previous studies on displacement and foreign bodies, as seen in her parachute installations shown in Barka Forts ‘SafeLandings’ 2010, and Not New Now : Marrakech Biennale, and the 4th Ghetto Biennale in Haiti 2017. For the first time in Becoming Landscape, Khimji uses transfer processes of her photography archive in her collage works, bringing the gesture of transference and a physicality to the appropriation of her photographic practice. Many of the images used are taken at construction sites in Oman, examining
building blocks of the city, subjects objectified, that at once become matter and memory, the past, present, and future colliding.
Radhika Khimji was born in Oman in 1979. She completed her BAFA at Slade School of Fine Art, her Post Graduate Diploma at the Royal Academy of Art, and her MA in Art History at UCL. Khimji has explored and repositioned her sculptural forms in variations of spaces, both in and out of gallery contexts. Recent exhibitions include Of Place and Places at Gallery Sarah, Muscat (Oman), Artefacts from Below at Project 88, Mumbai (India) , and participations at the Drawing Biennial in London, Not New Now : Marrakech Biennale, and the 4th Ghetto Biennale in Haiti.
Text by Aisha Stoby