Upstairs at the Museum, many of the artists have been given a space on each side of an airy central corridor or walkway. Walid Raad is showing a continuous installation of work [‘Index XXII-XXVI: Artists’] across his spaces which, he tells me without a wink, tell a complex but potent story about Lebanese artists that he’s listed -with the help of telepathy- across walls now ‘removed’ from his studio.

Names rendered white on white across the walls were apparently full of errors. Some of the correct ones are highlighted in bright colours and the artist has assembled the research he subsequently undertook on each of these. So far, Raad explains, none are of much note, but there are still many semi-erased names below, carrying a playful potency and not a little hope too. From an engaged archivism to invention of this kind is a significant step.

One project I’m especially excited to see in its complete form is Khalil Rabah's ‘Art Exhibition: Readymade Representations 1954-2009’ which fills the entrance stairwell. Today, it's being rehung in its entirety, somewhat randomly gathered on the floor and walls underneath a sign for The Orientalist Collection on permanent display in the museum.

Rabah is describing the new series as a form of readymade; repainted blown up press images of Palestinian art exhibitions from across the world over half a century, gathered in such a way as to comment on and subvert the notion of what an exhibition is or does, especially when it claims to embody a people or a state. In this case the state is Palestine, which adds abysmal depth to the work. More on this later.

Somewhere towards the furthest extent of the Biennial in Heritage Area East I stumble upon the installation of what I eventually realise is a film based on cut together surveillance footage of last year’s assassination of Mahmoud al-Mahbouh by the Mossad in Dubai. However, what I come across bears little direct relation to the YouTubed clip. Instead the film plays on and with face mapping or ‘scripting’, systems of identification, and the shared public spaces that this unwieldy murder plot abused.

Knowing something of the inception of the work, I'm mesmerised and slightly stunned by it and realise in that moment that I’d not been convinced that anything significant could be added to the original clip which so perfectly condenses the moment. Art is at its best when it defies expectation in this way.

On my return loop there are glimpses of many other things, including Emily Jacir's film and installation based on Lydda Airport in Palestine, attached to the town of Lydda which was ethnically cleansed in 1948. This is another highlight of the Biennial-to-come for me and another artist I'll be coming back to in more depth.

Back at the museum there are a series of small surprises; the peculiar but charmed juxtaposition of painterly forms on aluminium panels with nicely detailed slow-dawning patterns in the work of young Canadian artist Dan Brault for example. A jauntily lo-fi film combining stop-frame animations of gaudy jewellery and colourful graphic lines with other elements morphing into animals and then back, by Apichatpong Weerasethakul is something I’ve seen nothing quite like before. Both are clear rays of sunlight which contrast with Yta Barrada’s large blow ups of what might be children’s notebooks, with ‘stick’ numbers and figures. Alluringly oblique, they’re memorable for being inexplicably ominous.

Beyond all of this are quite a few things I've found no trace of yet, like the reworked surveillance films by CAMP from Mumbai, work by Jumana Emil Abboud, Khalid Hourani and Doug Ashford, or the proposal for an unmade installation by Hans Haacke. I’ve been eager to see the latter partly because I’ve so rarely stood before his work but mostly for its institution-shredding bite. Things I look forward to exploring further with it’s quietly spoken maker soon.