16 January 2024 - 5 February 2024
Ghada Khunji | London Art Fair 2024 | FaRIDA Series
The FaRIDA Series (2015 - 2022), as presented here in London Art Fair’s 2024 Platform section, directly borrows the visual language of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954) who created deeply personal works that not only interrogated the nature of her relationships with her family and lovers, but also examined the stories of her inner life, that often dealt with mental and physical pain and trauma. When Khunji was reintroduced to Kahlo’s paintings in 2015, her practice underwent a dramatic shift in approach.
Turning the lens on herself, Khunji began the FaRIDA series that was radically self-examining. In each work, a woman, Ghada Khunji, manifestly takes the position of Frida Kahlo in her self-portraits. Khunji strikes an uncanny visual resemblance with Kahlo, with the same slicked back black hair, strong dark eyebrows, penetrating stare and the inclusion of idiosyncratic objects and motifs. As Sulaf Derawy Zakharia comments, “The woman, FaRIDA, bears an unnerving resemblance to the Mexican painter, as does the photomontage to the painting. Both women, in obvious pain, stare stoically out of their respective works.”
In Khunji’s series, a woman holds our gaze in a photographic collage that superimposes different symbols that are deeply connected to the artist’s personal or family life. Though her photomontages nearly perfectly recreate the formal compositions of Kahlo’s paintings, Khunji creates her own visual language that holds deep personal significance. For instance, in FaRIDA I (2017) (Khunji’s rendition of Kahlo’s Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) ), Khunji replaces Khalo’s thorns with her mother’s bracelet, and swaps the Mexican artist’s pet monkey for an Arabian Falcon that sits protectively on her shoulder.
Kahlo was an artist known for her chameleon-like approach to the varying ways one could visually present gender, ethnicity and other signs of identity. For Kahlo, the personal was indeed political, and the mental and physical traumas Kahlo suffered throughout her life were laid bare in her mesmerising and richly symbolic portraits. In the way Kahlo visually narrated her stories of pain, so too, does Khunji. Khunji’s work speaks of the still pervasive taboos particularly in the Middle East that still dominate perceptions of women and their power, damage women’s relationships with their bodies, and restrict women’s ability to authentically be. It also reflects on the pain caused by societal restrictions imposed by gender norms, heritage and class, as distinct from that perpetuated by physical, emotional or mental violence. Perhaps, these two female artists who both reach into their lived experience with a frank honesty are able to recount the sufferings of other women, and transmute such pain into strength and beauty.
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