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.
In the Downtown space, Rabah presents new works on paper that also follow the exhibition’s recurring logic of repetition, rupture, and repair. From his home in Ramallah, the artist confronts daily life through the act of consistently drawing cut-down olive tree trunks, morphing their appearance into severed body parts and amoebic shapes.
In this new work, the shards of wood are drawn with bright wax sticks, only for them to be ripped and then reassembled in a cycle of destruction and mending. The process renders visible a condition of relentless reconstruction amid inexorable destruction.
These drawings are grouped around an homage to womanhood and motherhood, a monumental traditional Palestinian dress (thob) assembled from several worn thwab collected from grandmothers and women in various Palestinian villages.
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.