“One of the things I am trying to do and the reason I am trying to have a biennale in Palestine, is because maybe we will recognize the urgent need for such an industry, cultural production, knowledge dissemination, and participation. You know when we started to establish the Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem, people were asking us what a contemporary art foundation was in the first place.”

—Khalil Rabah

One often wonders how to do justice to artists who, beyond making artworks that travel through exhibition circuits, split the majority of their labor between being community builders, cultural facilitators, and educators.

Throughout his decades-long practice, Khalil Rabah has reflected on themes of knowledge-making, displacement, memory, identity, and the interactions between humans and their surroundings in multifaceted ways. Early on in his career, Rabah played a foundational role in fostering the art ecology in Ramallah and elsewhere in Palestine, carving out a space for his experimental and conceptual practice at a moment when many artists of his generation were creating art in line with the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) vision. He co-founded Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem in 1998, and the Riwaq Biennial in 2005, the roving exhibition arm of the Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation. A precursor to these projects, beginning in 1995 and formalized in 2003, Rabah established the ongoing project entitled the Palestine Museum of Natural History and Humankind, a semi-fictional institution founded to “promote wonder, discovery, and knowledge.” The communities he has built through the biennial and the museum since their inception have developed into networks reaching across the United States, the Persian Gulf, Europe, and of course Palestine.

The semi-fictional museum is the greatest and longest-running example of the kinds of public art projects Rabah develops, which are almost always connected to the community in which they exist. Many of Rabah’s works can be viewed as permutations of the Palestinian Museum, which itself collaborates with the Riwaq Biennial. At the Venice Biennale in 2009, for example, Palestine lacked a national pavilion, so the Riwaq Biennial entered itself—a biennial within a biennial. It showed photorealist paintings of its brochure and a map referring to the 50 Villages project, an initiative in which Riwaq rehabilitates the cluster of historic buildings that are located in or around Palestinian villages. This project developed out of 50320 Names (2007), in which Rabah documents the buildings in Riwaq’s Registry of Historic Buildings in Palestine and the people living in Palestinian villages who did not possess legal ownership of the heritage houses they occupied. These projects exist as both living archives, which are exhibited within the itinerant biennial, and as artworks about the archive itself. [1] Much of Rabah’s work follows the same ambiguous lines—hovering between artwork and actual public platform. In most cases they are linked to existing institutions.

The Palestinian Museum is laid out as an ongoing project. According to the installation’s circumstances and location, the museum finds new forms of presentation, exhibits, and thematic groupings. [2] Each iteration presents a rethinking of taxonomical areas rooted in traditional natural history categorizations: The Earth and Solar System, Anthropology, Geology and Palaeontology and the Botanical departments develop into vectors for thinking beyond the rigid and ossified categorizations of the national museum. Thinking through these departmental constructions, Rabah asks if the museological processes and forms of knowledge-making and dissemination applied in the West can hold under conditions of colonization and displacement. As he puts it, “The making and un-making of museums presents a new possibility of creating museums that aren’t necessarily monumental…a museum can be a form of art itself.” [3]

In recent versions of the museum, the department of the Earth and Solar System has been developed into a multimedia installation entitled The lowest point on earth memorial park (2017) to explore instances where the Israeli state has weaponized climate change in the ongoing occupation. This section includes works such as Dead Sea and 93%-95%, in which Rabah brings attention to water recession in areas of the Dead Sea that were conceded to the Palestinian authority. As an example of weaponizing climate change, the allotted space was expected to dry out and disappear within a few short decades, leaving behind barren, salt-poisoned lands. In this instance, Rabah employs the parameters of the natural sciences to understand settler colonialism through a climatic perspective. As Eyal Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, asks in relation to the history of Palestine, “What’s the relation between natural cycles and how they mobilize political processes and the political ideologies that go with them? What is the relation between the definition of the desert and legal realities?” [4] Half of Palestine now lives under what is termed the aridity line, a transversal movement that cuts across different political borders. The Earth and Solar System section powerfully articulates Rabah’s provocation to scale out to the “humankind” in the museum’s title, raising the question: is or could there be an affiliation between those communities living at the threshold of habitable climate conditions? [5] And how might braiding local spheres of knowledge, beyond the formalized fields of science, catalyze an inter-scalar process in which knowledge is developed ecologically—that is, across physical and psychical terrains? In fact many of the works in the museum center the perspectives of plants and animals, asking us to consider the world from their perspective.

The syntax that Rabah’s museum rests upon is fourfold. Act I, Carving, presents the title of the museum newsletter (which presents a fictionalized history of the museum that differs slightly from issue to issue) as engraved text, in a heavy black granite stone. Act II, Painting, recreates each leaf of the twenty-four-page newsletter into a large, oil-on-canvas, photorealistic painting, which is installed on an archival rack system. Act III, Molding, features the title of the work as a neon light, and Act IV, Printing includes the placement of the printed edition of the newsletter in the gallery, allowing visitors to take a copy with them.

The newsletter is divided into editorial sections that correspond to the museum’s categorizations. The Anthropology section in the summer 2011 issue, for example, contains “Seven Theses on Resistance from the Department of Anthropology” that begins with the following reflexive meditation:

The question of HUMANKIND is a question of philosophical anthropology. It raises a particular problem because HUMANKIND is both the subject and the object of any knowledge of itself.

While the Botanical section’s “Report on International Conservation” wryly unfolds a philosophical debate on the intertwined destinies of architecture, education, and politics:

BOTANY wondered aloud if modernists ever imagined that their buildings would outlast their ideas by such a margin…Is architecture then in some sense the goal of politics? Don’t all political ideas and sympathies secretly hope to become the architecture of our collective being—organizing and determining our movements and our possibilities in a similar way.

As Kelly O’Reilly observes, “Through his astute and well-targeted parodies, Rabah suspended his Museum somewhere in between a museum of the absurd and the horrors of political reality, reminding us that Palestine does not have its own national museum or gallery and is faced with international indifference as its social, cultural and ecological infrastructures are torn apart.” [6]

Renowned for its dark humor and deployment of the absurd, Rabah’s work has often been read as institutional critique. However, the artist’s framework arguably moves beyond the museum itself. Instead, he turns the very modes of analysis and institutional processes into his medium in order to challenge and dismantle the basis of knowledge formation and history-making itself in the context of colonialization.

With the museum at the heart of his multidimensional and collaborative projects, Rabah pursues an incredibly complex endeavor: on the one hand, he aims to dismantle normalized narratives of history that seek to deny Palestine a past, and on the other hand, he outlines the possibilities of reclaiming materials that gesture to a collective past and therefore a future. That he grounds this inquiry in an ethos of adaptability and collective participation in the building of historical narratives is perhaps something all museums could take note of nowadays.

This essay was originally written in nomination of Khalil Rabah for his project the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind for the 2022–2024 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice in the summer of 2022.

Nabila Abdel Nabi is currently Curator, International Art at Tate Modern where she has worked on exhibitions including Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life, The Making of Rodin, as well as various displays of Huguette Caland, Akram Zaatari, Yto Barrada, Wael Shawky and Infinite Geometry. Her work focuses on transnational and transregional histories of modernism and contemporary art in West Asia and North Africa. She was previously Associate Curator at The Power Plant in Toronto. Abdel Nabi has edited and contributed to multiple exhibition catalogues and publications. She holds degrees from the Courtauld Institute of Art and University of Chicago.