The objects Toba Khedoori paints are the familiar structures of urban life: walls, staircases, doorways, trains, tunnels. But they are rendered strange and unsettling by Khedoori’s technique of isolating the images within vast blank spaces of paper; often fragmentary, the objects seem to float, untethered from their usual places and roles. Khedoori makes us pay attention to the detail, allowing us to see, for example, a doorway or part of a staircase through new eyes. We seem to be looking at a strange world of isolated objects – a world with no people in it. But if we look closely, we do find traces of human presence: in the wax coating of the paper, we notice dust and hair and fingerprints – and we feel reconnected to the human aspect which seemed to be missing from the eerily beautiful pictures.
