Khalil Rabah
Born & Lives in:
Palestine
Location
- Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney
Born in 1961, Khalil Rabah’s multidisciplinary practice explores displacement, memory and identity through architecture, ecological elements and speculative institutional frameworks in the form of installations. Studying Architecture and Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Arlington, USA, Rabah’s installations are often sizeable and aim to occupy a space between fiction and reality. His work manifests in the form of sculpture, installation, video, action and various interventions that articulate the very real situation of occupation experienced by Palestinians. Rabah’s ongoing project, Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind, which has seen iterations exhibited in cities such as Athens, Istanbul and Amsterdam, playfully interrogates history as an accumulation of fact and artifice. Focusing on notions of objective truth and authenticity, Rabah’s bodies of work question and challenge the concept of archiving, documentation and the idea of museums themselves being repositories of objects and the construction of collective knowledge.
Khalil Rabah, Common Threads, 2025. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and Rubaiya Qatar, Qatar Museums. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semmler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg © Khalil Rabah. Installation view, 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, 2026, Chau Chak Wing Museum. Photograph: David James.
Khalil Rabah
Born 1961, Palestine
Lives and works in Ramallah, Palestine
Common Threads 2025
fabric, cotton threads
Presentation at the Biennale of Sydney was made possible by Rubaiya Qatar, Qatar Museums Authority.
Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, (Beirut)
While digging trenches during the Second Battle of Gaza in World War I, Australian soldiers uncovered a highly detailed Byzantine church floor dating from 561-562 CE. In 1917, the same year the British Government’s Balfour Declaration pledged support for a “national home for the Jewish people”, the Shellal Mosaic was extracted from Palestinian land, in violation of Ottoman antiquities law. Later installed at The Australian War Memorial, a portion of the Shellal Mosaic remains on display in the Canberra institution to this day.
For many, the Shellal Mosaic’s appropriation into a foreign collection may reflect a broader colonial project that takes Palestinian land, resources and cultural heritage. The Shellal Mosaic – once brought to life beneath the shuffling feet of worshippers – has taken on a new and equally metaphorical meaning behind the glare-proof glass of institutional display.
Recreating the mosaic’s highly detailed tesserae tile designs in Palestinian tatreez embroidery, Khalil Rabah’s Common Threads, interrupts the museum-bound narrative of the mosaic’s dislocation by reactivating its imagery within a living cultural practice. Each stitched bird or lion not only recalls the mosaic’s artistry but also asserts the continuity of Palestinian cultural identity. As an act of resistance, Common Threads directly counters the forces of erasure that began with the colonial politics of 1917 and continue today.