Khalil Rabah · Review

beirut art center is proud to present review, a solo exhibition by khalil rabah.

the works presented in review are the most recent outcomes of on-going projects that the artist has been working on for the past ten years. the title of the show refers to the processes by which rabah has reached these most recent iterations: the act of looking over something again; and the method of surveying with the possibility or intention of instituting a change if necessary. the works presented may vary in medium, from painting to photography and sculpture to installation; however the exhibition is underlined by a thread shared concerns, such as: the boundaries between the imaginary and reality; the use of objects and images as palimpsests; collisions between conventional and unconventional media within various institutions; the role of the gallery, museum and biennial; the synthesis of local realities in an international context; and the document as source and a document’s sources.

review contains three distinct sections, however the intersection of shared themes allows the works to be interpreted as part of a larger whole. in this issue is a work based on various aspects of the palestinian museum of natural history and humankind and specifically its summer 2011 newsletter, which reviews the institutional history of the museum. another geography is a work derived from the 3rd riwaq biennale, which takes the fractured landscape of palestine contextualised within the global art world, and presents it from another perspective, as a pixelated field of postcards. the section of the exhibition entitled two exhibitions is made up of three pairs of seemingly identical photo-realist paintings documenting a previous solo exhibition by the artist, art exhibition: readymade representations: 1954-2010. like a palimpsest, art exhibition is itself a collection of photo-realist paintings documenting nearly sixty years of exhibition making practices in different locations around the world.

review brings together works that typify khalil rabah’s method of historicizing and then re-historicizing, synthesising and then reviewing.