Khalil Rabah is a 2022–2024 Jane Lombard Fellow, nominated by Nabila Abdel Nabi for the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice Prize as part of the Vera List Center’s Correction* cycle of programs.

Rabah is an artist, the initiator and artistic director of the Riwaq Biennale, and a co-founder of Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem. Rabah’s most recent solo exhibitions have been held at Casa Árabe, Madrid (2016); Kunsthaus Hamburg (2015); e-flux, New York, (2013); and Beirut Art Center (2012), and recent group shows include Manifesta 12 Palermo (2018); the Sharjah Biennial (2017); the Marrakech Biennale (2016); and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014).

Rabah’s practice has long been concerned with the relationship between art and institutions. In 2003, Rabah founded the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind in an attempt to create a historical record for Palestine, while appropriating the aesthetic of the Western European museum and its capacity to produce meaning. While Rabah set out to critique Palestinian national representation, he inadvertently founded the first Palestinian national museum. A semi-fictional institution, Rabah has staged the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind throughout various institutions world-wide, each time expanding the museum and adding new iterations and categories which can include: The Earth and Solar System, Anthropology, Geology and Palaeontology, and Botanical departments. By using these departments, Rabah questions whether traditional, Western forms of knowledge and exhibition-making can also present the conditions of colonization, occupation, and displacement.

“Rabah follows an incredibly complex endeavor: on the one hand to dismantle normalized narratives of history that seek to deny Palestine a past and on the other hand, to outline the possibilities of reclaiming materials which gesture to a collective past and therefore a future.” 

—Nabila Abdel Nadi, Jane Lombard Prize Council