Weighing In

Seconds after finishing a conversation with Alexandre Khondji about his work, I found myself locked between two doors: an air gap designed to keep the hot air out, but with both handles installed on the inside. A flaw in the logic, or a trick. The space fits my hips just barely. While I had already locked the door behind me, I had not yet – could not yet – unlock the one ahead. I stood there feeling the dumb geometry of handles facing each other. I felt my breath slowing down, not in a panic, wondering why the space was made – or rather, how it might have come to this. And what occurred to me, standing there, was this: if this narrow stall of air and logic were the premise, how would Alexandre respond? This interval. This breakdown in passage. This minor pause that had, for a moment, taken over my day.

Khondji, alongside Saodat Ismailova and Hélène Yamba-Guimbi, is among the first artists selected for the Fondation Pernod Ricard’s Nouveau Programme, which marks a deliberate entanglement of outcome, context, process, and emerging practice through support that includes new works, solo presentations, residencies, and this first essay devoted to his practice. Here are the few things I can say with some certainty:

One: Holding a BA from Bard College, New York (2015) and an MFA from the Royal College of Art, London (2019), Alexandre Khondji has a background in art history and experimental cinema. Although these are disciplines he never pursued in any traditional sense, they unmistakably shape the way he thinks about form, framing, narrative, and space .

Two: He is not, by any stretch, a studio artist. Khondji’s work doesn’t emerge from solitary making but from careful, situational inquiry. He operates through site-specific research. His objects behave more like prepositions than nouns – along, across, beneath, against. Although different in tonality, Khondji’s sensibility mirrors writer Georges Perec’s attention to thresholds: “The street is a space suspended between two façades,” Perec writes in Species of Spaces (1974). You could say the same of an installation by Khondji: they are suspended between two functions, two temperatures, two gestures.

Three: Institutional critique flows through Khondji’s practice, but he doesn’t lean into hyperbole.

Four: His starting point is not with concept, but with an attunement to space – its light, its air, its protocols, its temperature shifts. When he arrives in a space, he first studies its volume and residue, its infrastructure and intentions. If his film training left any trace on him, it’s that every project has stages. Pre-production, production, post- project has stages. Pre-production, production, post-production. In his current work, that structure is repurposed: he starts with the space, lets it guide him.

Five: Of course, a room is always complicit. Khondji’s works do not float free from architecture that hosts them; they nestle into its cracks, press against its perimeters. They test the frame: what was this space built for? Who gets to move through it – and how? A room just never is all that neutral; it shrugs, holds old grievances, and reverberates.

The air is not still, the floor is lava. Khondji’s interventions echo the same – always precise, often provisional. Take his Dams (ongoing), aluminium flood barriers adapted from hyper‑practical readymades, which he installs across different galleries. Circulation, in turn, becomes choreographed. Not that it wasn’t before, but the refusal of smooth transition from one corner to the next reveals the former too. The aluminium is banal—speaking with Alexandre, I was reminded of the fact that the look of the work of some of my own favourite artists is often shaped by their less than rosy economic situation: a blue turns out to be that particular shade just because it is the cheapest one they could find at the local hardware store. The readymade is not a real obstacle, but nonetheless imposing. The viewer inevitably becomes a participant. As a result, each piece in Khondji’s evolving vocabulary functions as an apparatus expecting a choreography – a dance around the gap between the stories we tell. In this way, his work holds the potential of a quiet generosity and a sharp, spatial intelligence.

For Sorry Sun, Khondji will likely let his process be guided by the space he’s been invited to work in once again: the Fondation Pernod Ricard. Here, the artist will spend time in the offices—not just the gallery—locating the base of the foundation at the edge of a much larger corporate infrastructure: the building was developed by an investment group and inaugurated only four years four years ago. The foundation exists in the cracks, quite literally, between upper floors and corporate agendas. The exhibition space, of course, is clean and crisp, it’s what you’d expect from a white cube, except it’s marked by awkward contrasting ceiling heights. One half feels airy and lofty, typical; the other stoops lower, almost domestic in scale. Imagine its negative double just one floor up!

This perhaps is Khondji’s signature: he makes you feel the reserve space. The margins. The parts of the room that weren’t meant to be part of the encounter. And in that pause – the uncertain interval – we learn something new: about our own bodies, about architecture, and about what we’ve come to expect from both.

These are things I can say with clarity, and simultaneously, I’m almost intolerably aware as I’m writing of the gap between what I know of Khondji’s work and whatever he’s in fact cooking up. It feels strange—not knowing more—especially at a time when information is so easily accessible, communication so overused. This elusiveness should not be mistaken for youthful coyness or disinterest; it’s a deliberate stance shaped by radical non-communication, strategic absence, and the politics of context. In other words, the very elements that shape his site-specific works—who runs and owns the space, the way water flows in and out of it, how to reach its front door—affect not only how the final piece is shaped but also how it is ultimately seen, understood, and experienced. The conditions are stacked before he even walks through the door. Khondji’s practice is deeply aware of these factors, and in doing so, more than simply shining a light onto the quirks of a specific site itself, his work raises broader questions around visibility, legibility, and just how much an artwork—or an artist—should reveal. And so, in a moment dominated by hyper-communication and online self-performance, Khondji’s practice returns to a quieter, more complex inquiry: what can a work communicate without spelling everything out? How loud can a quiet work really be? Maybe that scratch is also why my critical impulse itches, so trained in assigning meaning where the work might prefer ambiguity. Let it have the space to make its own swagger, unburdened by interpretation.

Originally published on occasion of the exhibition Sorry Sun at Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, 2025.