Exhibition Department Head Susie Kantor discusses the inspiration behind the new Manetti Shrem installation
Written By: JONAH BERMAN — arts@theaggie.org
Earlier this month, the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art unveiled a new and innovative solo exhibition: “Weights & Measures,” by Oakland-based Sculptor Sahar Khoury. Running through June 20, this installment is the most expansive solo exhibition yet for Khoury, who has forged a unique artistic path across various 3D mediums. Khoury’s work has been shown in the Asian Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, among others.
Khoury developed the exhibition with Susie Kantor, an associate curator and exhibition department head at the museum. The two met nearly a decade ago and first collaborated at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Kantor remarked on the multiplicity of meanings the Manetti Shrem exhibition offers.
“It’s about mourning, it’s about loss, it’s about connections across time and space,” Kantor said. “It’s also about value. When I think of the title ‘Weights & Measures,’ I think of a scale that’s balancing. You’re thinking about the worth of something, the weight of something, the value of it.”
“Weights & Measures” builds on many of the concepts Khoury explored in her solo exhibition “Umm” (2023), which was shown at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. The title for that exhibition referred both to the transliteration of the Arabic word for “mother” and the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, who was known as the “Voice of Egypt.” Khoury’s work has often focused on the cultures and histories of North African and Southwest Asian nations.
In Khoury’s new exhibition, lyrics from a stanza of one of Kulthum’s songs are displayed on a wall in the piece “Untitled (Al-Atlal),” reading: “Give me my freedom / Release my hands, / When will this captivity end, / When the world is before us.”
While the lyrics ostensibly concern a painful relationship, they can also be read as a plea for the end of colonial structures, according to Khoury. In addition, the letters, while appearing light and puffy, are actually made from heavy brass. The double meanings on display in “Untitled (Al-Atlal)” are emblematic of many of Khoury’s sculptures, which resist easy understanding and singular interpretations.
“[Khoury] works a lot in metaphor,” Kantor said. “She’s talked about how her work is political, but sort of not obviously; sort of oblique. But there’s a lot of references in her work. She’s never going to say, ‘This is an exhibition about X, Y, Z and I’m talking about these things.’ It’s meant to be a bit of a discovery.”
One notable progression in “Weights & Measures,” compared to Khoury’s earlier work, is the difference in scope.
“When I first met her, she was working a lot smaller in scale,” Kantor said. “I think her scale has exploded a lot in the past couple of years.”
No work in “Weights & Measures” is more exemplary of this than “The Elephant in the Room,” a tower which greets viewers as they enter the exhibition.
Centered around a staircase which spirals exactly once per minute, the 12-foot-tall sculpture is immensely rich with commentary. Inspired by North African and Southwest Asian-style clock towers and marketplaces, the piece invites the viewer to interrogate the importance of ruins on our view of history. As implied by the title, “The Elephant in the Room” also includes life-sized, unglazed ceramic tusks, which were intended to have a similar appearance to actual ivory.
On one side of the exhibition space, a duck coated in gold lies atop a book discussing anthropology. On the other, multiple jars of olive oil, produced by a family in Palestine, are stacked in a small tower. Meanwhile, an hour-long looping audio track plays, which includes one of Kulthum’s songs and various sound fragments. The track was produced for the exhibition in collaboration with multiple DJs and composers.
The frequent utilization of found materials and cultural artifacts is indicative of Khoury’s anthropological background, which is one of the recurring subjects that ties together her body of work. Khoury, through her sculptures, uses casts of objects — from breads to gym equipment to Thanksgiving turkeys — to comment on how our society assigns value to everyday items.
“She describes a lot of the things that she’s interested in as both ubiquitous and unwanted,” Kantor said.
One of the exhibition’s works, “Untitled (Numbers/Puppets),” was also displayed in “Umm.” The piece consists of steel pipe numerals hanging from the ceiling, resembling marionettes in structure. The numbers appear as different years when viewed from different angles, representing dates of American imperalism in the Middle East. Here, Khoury conveys a nuanced and multifaceted perspective on memory and time in these nations.
“Sometimes, history is nothing but a collection of dates and who tells the story about them,” Kantor said.
When discussing what she hopes students and museumgoers will gain from the exhibition, Kantor reemphasized the importance of each viewer finding their own meaning within the work.
“I hope what they take out of it is that there’s no one right answer,” Kantor said. “Particularly with this exhibition, there’s so many things you can take out of it, and I want people to have that freedom.”
While the exhibition is already available to the public, there will be an official opening via the Manetti Shrem’s annual Winter Season Celebration on Feb. 1, featuring both Kantor and Khoury in discussion with one another. The free event will be from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Manetti Shrem museum.
Kantor expressed her delight in getting the opportunity to formally introduce the new exhibition to the Davis community.
“We’ve had all these discussions throughout this process where it’s just been the two of us [Khoury and I],” Kantor said. “I’m just excited to share that energy with everyone else.”
Written by: Jonah Berman — arts@theaggie.org
