About Sanam Khatibi

Sanam Khatibi is a Belgian artist who lives and works between Brussels and Paris. Painting lies at the centre of her practice, alongside sculpture, embroidery, installation, and tapestry. 

Her practice examines our reactions to situations of danger, trauma, disasters (manmade or environmental) and how we encounter power structures. Her work brings together human and animal figures, plants, landscapes, and objects in scenes that hover between beauty and unease, attraction and danger. She is interested in the ambiguities and predispositions that shape human behaviour, and in the tension between what we consider civilised and the more unruly forces that remain beneath the surface 

The worlds Khatibi creates are seductive but never entirely safe. Lush vegetation, vivid colours, decorative patterns, and idyllic landscapes suggest a paradise, yet something darker is always taking place within it. Her figures follow their impulses, and acts of intimacy, play, violence, and domination can exist side by side. This tension between paradise and hell runs through her work: a world that appears harmonious on the surface but is governed by forces that are more primitive and unpredictable underneath. 

Her visual language has developed through an equally wide-ranging encounter with images, objects, and cultures. Khatibi grew up surrounded by her mother’s extensive collection, which included Chinese and Japanese porcelain, tapestries, miniatures, and other artefacts. She lived in different places across Europe and encountered people and cultures from a variety of backgrounds. Museums, travel, literature, and collecting became an important part of her visual education. Her references range from Carol Rama, Francis Bacon, and Henry Darger and the tradition of outsider art to pre-Columbian objects, Japanese masks, and seventeenth-century still-life painting. These influences do not appear as quotations in her work. Rather, they become part of a personal visual vocabulary in which different periods, cultures, and forms of representation can coexist. 

This way of collecting and recombining is also central to the Living in Abby. Khatibi approaches the existing collection of Abby much as she approaches her own collection: intuitively, through attraction, association, and visual resonance. The collection encompasses paintings, sculptures, and a large number of artefacts, including everyday and utilitarian objects. Khatibi has selected a number of these objects and given them a new context, often presenting ordinary things as sculptural forms in their own right. In the display cases, they are arranged intuitively and brought into dialogue with a selection of her own works. Rather than illustrating a particular theme, the installation creates unexpected relationships between objects that originate in different contexts. 

The resulting living room is Khatibi’s interpretation of an existing collection, transformed into a space that belongs unmistakably to her own universe. It is neither a reconstruction nor a neutral presentation of the collection. Instead, the objects are absorbed into an environment shaped by her particular way of looking, collecting, and composing. 

At the centre of the installation is a monumental, hand-woven tapestry produced at the ateliers of Le Crécit in the Hainaut province. It depicts a seemingly paradisiacal landscape populated by figures engaged in ambiguous and sometimes disturbing activities. The landscape on the tapestry extends into the exhibition space. Exotic plants surround the objects and artworks, while a series of benches winds through the room like a snake, introducing both a practical and an almost living element into the architecture. 

In the Living, collection and imagination become inseparable. Objects are detached from their original functions and histories and placed within a new, instinctive logic. The familiar becomes strange, the decorative becomes unsettling, and the paradise suggested by the room remains charged with the possibility of something darker. Khatibi does not offer a single interpretation of this world. Instead, she creates an environment in which beauty, desire, violence, instinct, and curiosity can coexist. 

Khatibi’s work is held in national and international collections, such as The Norton Museum, West Palm Beach, USA; Dib Bangkok: Museum of International Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand; S.M.A.K Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent, Belgium; City of Nantes, France; The Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; BPS22 Musée d’Art de la Province de Hainaut; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; and has presented her work at the 16th Istanbul Biennial (Turkey), Le Voyage à Nantes (France), Kunsthal Kade, Amersfoort, (The Netherlands), Kunstverein Dresden (Germany), MAC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Marseille (France), Centraal Museum in Utrecht (the Netherlands), and M HKA in Antwerp (Belgium). In Belgium, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges in 2021, Kunsthal Gent in 2020, and BPS22 in Charleroi in 2019. 

Khatibi is represented by rodolphe Janssen in Brussels, Mendes Wood DM in Paris and São Paulo, and P.P.O.W. in New York.