Official description: Khalil Rabah’s work Relocation, Among Other Things – a version of the artist’s ever-evolving project The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind – addresses the phenomenon of nomadism, of life suspended across different countries and homelands. In addition to referencing exile and flight, this work challenges the idea and purpose of a museum and acts as a museological investigation conducted through a diasporic lens. Collecting objects from abandoned shops, homes, and industrial spaces, Rabah choreographs an ever-changing composition. He employs museological strategies of display, with vitrines and storage hanging systems that are filled in with new finds at each juncture of Rabah’s journey. From an ontological perspective, the work retells the story of a life in constant flux.
Khalil Rabah (born 1961 in Jerusalem) is a Palestinian conceptual artist. He studied architecture and fine arts at the University of Texas. His artistic practice uses multiple forms of performative action to investigate histories of removal, erasure, displacement, and marginalization. Rabah lives and works in Ramallah.
Khalil Rabah: Relocation, Among Other Things, 2018 / Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Art Basel 2023 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 14, 2023.
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