Project Description

While many Western critics have emphasised the national, religious and ethnic origins
of Khalil Rabah’s preoccupation with boundaries and containment, his work engages
with more conceptual and universal questions relating to the shifting borders of
narrative, history and space. Rabah's practice investigates, reinvents, and critiques
modes & modules, factors and «factories» of production. Looking to go beyond the
literal description of events, Rabah exploits the imaginary and the real to propose a
critique.

In Art Exhibition, Rabah shifts his focus to the historiography of modern art. The
installation, based on a substantial amount of archival research, explores several
questions around modern Palestinian art, its key figures and protagonists (artists,
curators, audiences), platforms (museums, galleries, artist-run centers) and
documentation (personal photographs, press and institutional archives).
For this act of museological mimicry, the artist has selected fifty photographs that span a period of roughly fifty years of Palestinian art exhibitions, in locations all over the world. Starting in 1961 until the present, the artist creates a subjective historical remapping of exhibition-making practices, by converting press clipping and documents to photorealistic paintings. The re-construction of the photos in painting, done not by the artist’s hand, is a further element he outlines. The outcome is a ‘collection’ that intends to deconstruct the notion of an exhibition and its manifestations in history.

The exhibition includes works curated in the following thematic categories in
painting: Landscape, Framed, Temperature, Dialogue, Portraits, Monotheistic, Wet,
Exhibition,Photograph, Dot, Date, Action and Text.

Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Produced with the assistance of Rana Sadik and Samer Younis

April 2011