{"id":225123,"date":"2026-03-18T10:52:17","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T10:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/225123\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T10:52:17","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T10:52:17","slug":"weights-and-measures-maps-war-memory-and-uneasy-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/225123\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Weights and Measures\u2019 maps war, memory and uneasy silence"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s skies.<\/p>\n

In \u201cSahar Khoury: Weights and Measures,\u201d 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 \u201csound sculpture\u201d of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum\u2019s song \u201cAl Atlal\u201d plays in the background. In English, the song title translates as \u201cThe Ruins.\u201d To Western ears, the original song sounds like a sorrowful dirge. Kulthum\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s the kind of structure that immediately grabs the viewer\u2019s 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\u2019s room to walk underneath a connecting ramp which doubles as a platform. A few bottles of Palestinian olive oil sit nestled upon it.<\/p>\n

Political statements, lightly camouflaged throughout \u201cWeights and Measures,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

A more ambiguous element is a grouping of ceramic elephant tusks. Mounted like guard rails on the upper \u201cstory,\u201d 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\u2019s conclusion and, perhaps, a necessary scolding. Raymond Carver might have described the presence of the tusks as: What We Talk About When We Don\u2019t Talk About War.<\/p>\n

Mounted on a wall directly across from Untitled is a second\u2014and not the last\u2014work also called Untitled. Its subtitle, (the title of Omar El Akkad\u2019s 2025 nonfiction book), refers to the author\u2019s book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. In her review in The Guardian, Dina Nayeri described it as \u201ca passionate indictment of complacent liberal responses to Israel\u2019s brutal campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cknuckles\u201d or joints. They look like phalanges exhumed from the site of an open grave. This word puzzle evokes the content of El Akkad\u2019s book while also suggesting the real-life consequences of its subject matter.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>INSTALLATION VIEW Sahar Khoury\u2019s \u2018Untitled (the puppet dates), 2025\u2019 is made from forged steel. Courtesy of the artist and CANADA, Rebecca Camacho Presents and Parker Gallery.\u00a0(Photo by Robert Divers Herrick)<\/p>\n

Untitled (the puppet dates) is a grouping of numbers forged in steel. Where the brass letters could fit in the palm of one\u2019s 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 \u201cUmm,\u201d a 2023 exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio. \u201cWeights and Measures\u201d expands on the Ohio iterations.<\/p>\n

Kantor explained that at the Wexner, \u201cThey were more static. We really liked the idea of hanging it from the ceiling to give a sense of movement.\u201d 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. \u201cThey give that sense of movement and perspective about the way in which humans think about time,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018Sahar Khoury: Weights and Measures\u2019 is on view through June 20 at The Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in Davis. manettishremmuseum.ucdavis.edu\/current-exhibitions<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sometimes planes fly over our quiet suburban streets. On the ground we hear the turbines before we see…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":225124,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,5809,145,144],"class_list":{"0":"post-225123","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-oakland","9":"tag-oakland-artist","10":"tag-oakland-headlines","11":"tag-oakland-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}