Oakland artist Sahar Khoury turns ruins into political allegory
By Jeffrey Edalatpour
Sometimes planes fly over our quiet suburban streets. On the ground we hear the turbines before we see them, if we see them at all. Like our neighbors, we continue doing chores inside or outside in the yard. We walk our dogs, the young and the elderly to grassy parks nearby. But when the world at large is at war the sound of airplanes in flight loses any semblance of neutrality. This month the roaring jet engines correspond with the drone and missile attacks blackening Tehran’s skies.
In “Sahar Khoury: Weights and Measures,” similar correspondences take place in an exhibit that, depending on the piece, can also tonally drift apart. When museumgoers walk into the gallery, a deconstructed “sound sculpture” of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum’s song “Al Atlal” plays in the background. In English, the song title translates as “The Ruins.” To Western ears, the original song sounds like a sorrowful dirge. Kulthum’s live performances turned the song into something anthemic for Arab audiences. The lyrics speak to a broken romance, but her audience also interpreted the song as an allegory of political oppression.
The narratives Khoury advances in the exhibit are expressed in various media but primarily through sculpture and video. Untitled (the elephant in the room [the tower of silence]) is the biggest statement piece. It’s the kind of structure that immediately grabs the viewer’s attention. From a few feet away, the sculpture evokes the remnants of a building in a state of decay. Black and skeletal, all the walls and windows are gone, removed by some unseen force. Up close, a small motor turns a spiral staircase, zombie-like, round and round. There’s room to walk underneath a connecting ramp which doubles as a platform. A few bottles of Palestinian olive oil sit nestled upon it.
Political statements, lightly camouflaged throughout “Weights and Measures,” are easy to find. Olive oil is the least visible object within the framework of Untitled. To discover the fact that the oil was made in Palestine, one has to read the fine print.
A more ambiguous element is a grouping of ceramic elephant tusks. Mounted like guard rails on the upper “story,” their threatening end points spike-upwards, exposed and ready to cause harm. Without the subtitle, the elephant in the room, their inclusion remains open to more ambiguous interpretations. With it one is led to the artist’s conclusion and, perhaps, a necessary scolding. Raymond Carver might have described the presence of the tusks as: What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk About War.
Mounted on a wall directly across from Untitled is a second—and not the last—work also called Untitled. Its subtitle, (the title of Omar El Akkad’s 2025 nonfiction book), refers to the author’s book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. In her review in The Guardian, Dina Nayeri described it as “a passionate indictment of complacent liberal responses to Israel’s brutal campaign.”
The title is spelled out across the wall both horizontally, vertically and in a haphazard yet still legible pattern. Each individual letter is cast in brass with “knuckles” or joints. They look like phalanges exhumed from the site of an open grave. This word puzzle evokes the content of El Akkad’s book while also suggesting the real-life consequences of its subject matter.
Untitled (the puppet dates) is a grouping of numbers forged in steel. Where the brass letters could fit in the palm of one’s hand, the numbers are human-sized. When I was on site, associate curator and exhibition department head Susie Kantor told me the numbers were also installed at “Umm,” a 2023 exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio. “Weights and Measures” expands on the Ohio iterations.
Kantor explained that at the Wexner, “They were more static. We really liked the idea of hanging it from the ceiling to give a sense of movement.” As the numbers almost imperceptibly drift or turn on their wires, the lighting also ignites a shadow play. The dates, Kantor said, are of importance to the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and West Asia. “They give that sense of movement and perspective about the way in which humans think about time,” she said.
The sculptures in the gallery that fill up the space and the eye use the same or a similar blunt-edged visual vocabulary. Cages and fences come to mind, along with the rusted refuse of abandoned cities. The smaller sculptures look like first or second drafts that belong in a different, lighter and more decorative show. Central to Untitled (the send off) is a collection of ceramic blue tiles meant to symbolize a body of water.
Objects like porcelain duck decoys, altars and duck decoys in altars have been placed at random points along the river, lake or pond. The work is pretty and playful rather than cohering as a complete thought. Part of the problem is the placement; the tiles are pushed up against a wall.
In another configuration, as a round central lake in the middle of the gallery, for instance, it could carry the weight of emotion and meaning as the other untitleds do. Ducks the size of those forged steel numbers could also deliver the same confrontational messages rather than distract us with their beautiful glazes.
‘Sahar Khoury: Weights and Measures’ is on view through June 20 at The Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in Davis. manettishremmuseum.ucdavis.edu/current-exhibitions
