Sahar Khoury
Weights & Measures,
Jan 7 – Jun 20, 2026

The exhibition’s subtitle, Weights & Measures, evokes systems of value, physical and emotional burdens that people carry, and musical tempos. With a background in anthropology, Khoury’s work interrogates how we ascribe value to people and places. Her use of found and discarded objects invites us to consider what cultures cast aside, and what those choices reveal.

Weights & Measures comes at a moment of national recognition for Khoury, an Oakland-based artist who has lived in the Bay Area for nearly 30 years. Her work is on view concurrently at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, through Jan. 26, and at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, through Jan. 17. She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2025) and the Eureka fellowship (2026-2029) and will be a 2026 Resident Faculty Artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine.

“By weaving personal, familial and global histories, Khoury speaks to the ways we both come together and come apart through singular and collective experiences such as mourning and grief, and shared cultural rituals of baking bread and listening to music,” said Kantor, who curated the exhibition. “Weights & Measures cements her as one of the most experimental and vital sculptors working in Northern California today.”

The emotional center of the exhibition is The Elephant in the Room, a welded metal structure hung with cast ceramic, iron and brass objects meant to evoke both the ruin of a clock tower and the marketplaces of North Africa and Southwest Asia, including Jordan, Palestine, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon. For Khoury, ruins are not simply architectural or archeological fragments. They are witnesses to people and places that are resisting their own extinction, carrying their memory and spirit across time and place. At the installation’s center, a spiral staircase rotates, recalling the tower’s original function of marking time. By playing with material hierarchies in her casts — for example, casting ducks in both gold and ceramic — Khoury imbues them with different societal values.

Khoury earned her B.A. in anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 1996 and her M.F.A. from UC Berkeley in 2013. She received the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Art Award in 2019. Her work has been exhibited at Oakland Museum of California; the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, in Bay Area Now 8 (2018), and CCA Wattis Institute for the Arts, San Francisco. Khoury is represented by Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco; CANADA, New York; and Parker Gallery, Los Angeles.