Untitled (red with belts)

Khoury’s meticulously-crafted works often appear improvisatory, incorporating industrial materials and discarded objects, such as pet cages or these leather belts. She describes how constraints can offer safety but also limit freedom. These tensions relate both to Khoury’s pets and to geopolitical conflicts with which she is engaged as the child of Iranian and Jordanian-Palestinian refugees.

Having previously worked as an anthropologist in Latinx communities, Khoury is drawn to physical and social instability. She comments, “Ethnography is a lot about observing the banal and the everyday and listening to it with a special sensitivity... I am more interested in points of unity rather than purity; purity just doesn’t exist in my worldview.”