Palestinian artist Khalil Rabah’s solo exhibition “Review” was a reassessment and reformulation of three ongoing projects, spanning sculpture, installation, painting, printed material and archival practices. Rabah’s conceptual projects explore the institutional infrastructure of the arts, particularly as it relates to and results from the nation-state system, while questioning its implications for the stateless nation of Palestine. Held at Beirut Art Center (BAC), the show delved into issues of representation through scrutinizing, undermining and proposing alternatives to established models, aesthetics and discourses of cultural presentation. 

On display was In This Issue (2006–12), an installation revolving around an alleged Summer 2011 newsletter of the fictional Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (PMNHH). Purportedly established by Rabah in 1961 (in fact the year of the artist’s birth), this imagined museum holds exhibits in various locations of mock-up artifacts and fossils in realistic displays. By blurring fantasy and fact, PMNHH calls into question the authenticity of museum institutions and our assumptions regarding them. Realized within the framework of other cultural venues—such as the Istanbul (2005) and Liverpool (2008) biennials—PMNHH refashions the permanent, rooted and official museum model to respond to the conundrum of perishing, displaced and unrecognized Palestine.

In four acts, In This Issue challenges the standard discourse of museums. Act IV: Printing presents 2,000 copies of the newsletter, outlining PMNHH’s mission, collection, departments and activities. In Act III: Molding, a quote from the cover is cast in massive, red neon lights. Act II: Painting displays each of the newsletter’s 24 pages as a large-scale, photorealistic painting on sliding racks. Through hyperbolic display and language, In This Issue underscores the formalized nature of museological rhetoric, highlighting the absurdity of its application to the non-conventional case of Palestine. 

Adapting homogenized institutional models to local realities is also the concern of Another Geography (2009–12), an installation derived from the third Riwaq Biennale (2009), which Rabah co-founded in Palestine. Entitled “A Geography: 50 Villages,” the Biennale pursued events that engaged in creating opportunities for regeneration in and around architecturally significant villages across the Palestinian territories. Fifty postcards documenting each of the villages were produced. Reflecting the cultural and political realities of segmented, occupied Palestine, “A Geography” challenged preconceptions of the biennial format and its reliance on a major, central display. 

At BAC, Another Geography featured 7,000 copies of each of the original 50 postcards, laid out as a diminishing cantonal map of Palestine, with visitors invited to retrieve pieces. These products of “A Geography,” and arguably the Riwaq Biennale itself, were presented as an artwork. This provided a means for traversing the biennial’s traditional time- and place-specific scopes, but also for (re)inserting Palestine into international art platforms as well as sustaining a dialogue about the conception and configuration of biennials in general. 

Also on view was Two Exhibitions (2012), featuring six enormous photorealistic paintings. These were created from photographs taken at the 2011 Sharjah Biennial of Rabah’s traveling show “Art Exhibition: Readymade Representations: 1954–2010,” which consists of 50 paintings based on photographs of Palestinian art exhibitions worldwide from 1954 to 2010. Miniature photographs of these 50 paintings were included as an archival installation within Two Exhibitions.

“Art Exhibition” draws on the artist’s personal archives and those of friends and cultural institutions, as well as press clippings. Through its selective procurement process and categorization method—whereby the paintings of the exhibitions are the basis for classification and not the artworks displayed within the paintings—Rabah’s archive presents a history of Palestinian art that is undeniably subjective, and challenges archives as sources of historical fact. Two Exhibitions extends beyond this to ruminate on the act of exhibiting the writing and archiving of art history. 

“Review” certainly demonstrated Rabah’s continuing interest in cultural institutions, particularly as an entry point to the subject of Palestine, situating its specificities within the global arts framework. Most noteworthy, however, was Rabah’s reliance on form to articulate these conceptual concerns, and the insight that the resulting works provided into his process.