Khalil Rabah returns to Lebanon after eight years with a two-part solo exhibition presented simultaneously across our Karantina and Downtown spaces. Bringing together new works and new iterations of ongoing projects, the exhibition extends Rabah’s sustained inquiry into the politics of objects, materials, and forms.
The Karantina gallery hosts multi-chapter installations that revisit his show at Special Projects/Art Basel Qatar in 2026. Transition, among other things unfolds as a space of surreal transformations and transitions. The installations are arranged within a labyrinth of dead-ends and obstructions created by sculptural configurations assembled from used household objects. Uprooted from their original functional logics, the objects combine the absurd with an unmistakable sense of danger. A greenhouse becomes a place where plants are left to wither. Tables are overturned and weighed down with mounds of sharp nails. Rusted saws protrude from the colorful folds of tarps. Barbed wire is wedged between ornate chandeliers. An ironing board is placed within a display case, with a pile of surveillance cameras resting on top, their defunct lenses turned in a scrutinizing gaze towards the entrance of the space.
Rabah’s exhibition recalls the absurdity of Dada, alluding to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and the use of banal materials. Yet his objects are not simply displaced from everyday life into the gallery. The stories they carry continue to resonate within the exhibition space as they move between function and form, object and image, utility and display. Through their reconfiguration, Rabah exposes the coercion embedded in everyday material life and its infrastructures. More significantly, he subjects these accumulated associations to a process of translation, moving objects from one register to another, from the functional to the sculptural, from the familiar to the strange. In this passage, objects relinquish their original functions and are transfigured into new forms.
The installation operates as a kind of living archive, but one without a fixed order, where objects are continuously categorized, stacked, contained, displayed, and re-displaced. Each item remains legible (a chair, a shoe, a hammer), yet their arrangement produces a system that cannot quite be read. This tension between recognition and incomprehension is central to the exhibition. Rabah’s objects become defamiliarized without becoming abstract; they remain materially and formally intelligible while their conventional meanings slip out of reach. The installation thus approaches something akin to asemic writing: a form of script with marks that retain the appearance of structure and transmission but without offering a determinate semantic content. It evokes a world increasingly saturated with signs, images, interfaces, and fragments of information that promise legibility while producing meanings that are partial, unstable, or impossible to fully decipher.
Across the two spaces, Rabah’s works move between systems of ordering and reading, asking how meaning is carried, altered, or lost as things change form. Objects are sorted and accumulated, displayed and concealed, translated and retransmitted, broken apart and repaired. What persists is not an original state, but the possibility of transformation. In this sense, Some other things ruled it is less an exhibition than a proposition. Rabah is not cataloging what has been destroyed or discarded so much as testing how things might be reorganized.