Oman-born Indian artist Radhika Khimji is representing the Gallery Sarah at the Art Dubai Contemporary. Radhika’s work is lodged at a crossroads between multiple polarities. It is at once a painting, a drawing and a collage. It’s also an embroidery and a sculpture. By combining all of these elements, images overlap with one another to create strange, new hybrids.Her work is also informed primarily by the materiality and physicality of the making process. Existing in a state of transit, these works inhabit a space of movement and change. They reflect upon displacement and identity as a way to render them abstract from their loaded histories. Radhika explores states of being and non-being and the re-contextualisation of movement and the body.Radhika graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in 2005. Previous solo exhibitions include B-Sides at Nature Morte Gallery in India (2009), Safe landings at Barka Castle in Oman (2010), Found Gesture at the Katara art Center in Qatar (2012). Her work was also part of the Jogja Biennale (2013), Fragments 2 at Gallery Sarah (2014), the 4th Ghetto Biennale, Port –Au – Prince, Haiti (2015) and more recently 6th Marrakesh Biennale, Marrakesh, Morocco (2016).This year, for the first time, Gallery Sarah will be representing Oman at the prestigious fair. Located in the historical part of Old Muscat and part of the Bait Al Zubair Museum complex, Gallery Sarah is a unique contemporary art gallery, which opened its doors in 2013. The gallery exhibits artworks including, but not limited to, paintings, graphics, calligraphy, installations, sculpture and photography. Apart from trying to create a strong connection between established and emerging Omani artists and the international art world, Gallery Sarah also supports and appreciates work by a wide variety of talented Arab artists from around the Gulf and international artists.Art Dubai has become a cornerstone of the region’s fast-growing contemporary arts community. Recognised as one of the most globalised meeting points in the art world today, Art Dubai places an emphasis on maintaining its intimate, human scale while foregrounding quality and diversity.Talking about her creation Radhika says, “The colourful drawings contain an abstract world of dots and swirls, which bear the traces of traditional Indian and Western non-representational painting.”She also depicts figures that slump like molten plastic: bodies that might be said to echo the modernist painterly figuration that emerged (almost in parallel) in postwar European and in post-Independence Indian art. Her works also explore fantasy; for they depict an imaginary world in which bodies might merge, splice and vanish into cosmic voids and vacuums.Using her architectural pens – thinly pointed and dense with ink – she sketches shapes, patterns and bodies. Much of her work begins from these drawings, and she is adept at extrapolating their cosmic dramas. For example, her ongoing interest in revealing both sides of a sheet of paper has emerged from the fact that the pens she uses often bleed onto the other side. Radhika has even constructed items of furniture to display these papers, with sliding and overlapping panels that allow the pages to be realigned.Gallery Sarah will be at the Art Dubai, Madinat Jumeirah from March 16-19, 2016. Follow@ARTINFOIndia
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