Radhika Khimji (born Oman, 1979) spent one and a half months on the island of Kea as a Qbox resident artist. In her solo show, entitled Rashm I: The Corridor of Rasm and curated by Ana Luiza Varella, Khimji presents a new body of work consisting of drawings that mainly derive from her notebooks.

 

In the curator’s words Khimji’s pocketsize notebooks have always played a central role in her art. They articulate a primal and unmediated urge to acknowledge and understand the world through drawing. She wants to achieve the same looseness and casualness of making and showing the notebooks with the new large-scale pieces. Many of the drawings are double-sided and although the artist distinguishes front from back, there is no clear-cut hierarchy. Rather, both sides depend on each other. Colors bleed through the paper and one side is completed or troubled by the other side’s imagery. The surface of each image implies myriad of textures, including that of the paper itself. Some drawings are more saturated than others, but they are all assembled from a combination of cropped photographs, areas of paint and traces of pen.

 

With the title Rashm I: The Corridor of Rasm, Khimji alludes to the state of being in between two drawings. Rashm is an Arabic word for drawing in different mediums, coined from rasm, which means to draw. To be in a corridor means to be at the threshold, which could entail movement and steadiness but also anxiety and instability. The corridor makes it impossible for the viewer to see the two drawings simultaneously and condemns him to a peripheral and unstable viewpoint. A particular temporality is implicated by the relentless moving around drawings, required for one to take in the full picture, and not unlike the continuous turning of pages to see a full notebook.

 

Radhika Khimji was born in Muscat, Oman in 1979. After completing her BFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, she did her post-graduate studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in London and a second Masters at UCL in the History of Art. The artist has shown widely in the United Kingdom, Europe, United States, Middle East and Indi0a. Her most recent exhibitions include a solo show at Bose Pacia in New York and group exhibitions at the Saatchi Gallery and INIVA in London. Furthermore, her work has been shown at major art fairs such as Art Dubai, ARCO, The Indian Art Summit and Art Basel Miami Beach.

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