Tuesday 25 / February / 2025
Child of Oman, Radhika Khimji emerged as a global artist from Muscat, a place of layered identity on the cosmopolitan crossroads of the trading routes linking the Arabian Gulf, Asia, and Africa. Her conceptual coordinates now stretch north to Europe and across the Atlantic to the other side of the world.
What has always distinguished Radhika’s art is her raw, unstoppable originality... And it now roams through more rugged and inaccessible mindscapes. Radhika speaks of “loaded histories enmeshed with hidden signifiers of identity born of real-life places and displacements,” themes that run deep for this decidedly international artist, who lives several months a year in London, yet remains rooted in her hometown of Muscat. What she absorbs by exhibiting in places like Athens, Paris, Delhi, Port au Prince, and Marrakech create unpredictable transitions in the transformative art that she brings home, and the increasingly diverse places where she exhibits her work seem to reflect the ways in which we can learn more about who we are from the perspective of other places. What is most exciting about the current phase in her work is the global scope, which she explores and unpacks through her art pieces.
“The signifiers of identity are constantly kept in a state of transit to shift points of view and mirror changes in temporality and culture. The outcomes, the fragments that emerge and are created, will go beyond documentation to exposition of creative processes.”
To appreciate more fully Radhika’s recent works, which seem to emerge as oddly unfamiliar creatures that come from sources deep within where her probing consciousness encounters manifestations of the unconscious, it’s rewarding to view them in context of her previous work. Radhika continues to employ certain recurring motifs, including ‘dots’, perhaps initially inspired by the scattered stones that populate the wadis of Oman. Her dots are symbolic and kinetic and may be seen as pulsations, flashes of energy, drops of blood, empty spaces, fresh bullet holes, and spinning planets. Radhika’s signature stitching with red thread to make a bird’s nest, a moon, or an abstract line serves to uproot the meaning of embroidery, transforming it into minimalist art on a contemporary horizon.
Another signature theme reappears in the ‘Shifters,’ life-size cut-outs of faceless, sometimes muscular, always awkward humanoid beings, which have danced in nets on walls, dropped with parachutes into the courtyard of Barka Castle, transformed the ruins of a palace in Morocco and revolutionised gallery spaces in London, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Delhi, Port au Prince. Some of Radhika’s Shifters have become more abstract and less decipherable of late. One of the Shifters, currently loitering at Gallery Sarah, is simply an outline that tempts the imagination of viewer into active participation, which, it turns out, is one of her primary aims.
“My work unravels identities from different geographic and cultural perspectives through interactive installations that may include the Shifters and display photo collages and drawings on paper. The works are made abstract and fragmented, destabilising cultural hierarchies to render visible the intangible qualities of places and how they may relate to each other,” she explains. “Identity is investigated as multifarious, fluid and complexly relational to place. Interactive psychological as well as physical journeys are opened up for possible exploration by viewers who can make discoveries about their own identities and mental pathways as they interact with the works. They can juxtapose meanings and integrate or disassemble ideas. In the big picture, deeper cross-cultural understanding can be a pillar of stability in troubled regions.”
In an earlier stage of her career, after her début at Art Dubai, a critic spoke of Radhika as “One to watch”. Time has proved him right.
Radhika Khimji
Stay up to date with her latest work and upcoming exhibitions at radhikakhimji.com
