Art Exhibition: Readymade Representations 1954—2009

Overview

Rabah's practice investigates, reinvents, and critiques modes & modules, factors and 'factories' of production. Looking to go beyond the literal description of events, Rabah exploits the imaginary and the real to propose a critique.

In Art Exhibition, Rabah shifts his focus to the historiography of modern art. The installation, based on a substantial amount of archival research, explores several questions around modern Palestinian art, its key figures and protagonists (artists, curators, audiences), platforms (museums, galleries, artist-run centers) and documentation (personal photographs, press and institutional archives).

For this act of museological mimicry, the artist has selected fifty photographs that span a period of roughly fifty years of Palestinian art exhibitions, in locations all over the world. Starting in 1961 until the present, the artist creates a subjective historical remapping of exhibition-making practices, by converting press clipping and documents to photorealistic paintings. The re-construction of the photos in painting, done not by the artist’s hand, is a further element he outlines. The outcome is a ‘collection’ that intends to deconstruct the notion of an exhibition and its manifestations in history.

The exhibition includes works curated in the following thematic categories in painting: Landscape, Framed, Temperature, Dialogue, Portraits, Monotheistic, Wet, Exhibition,Photograph, Dot, Date, Action and Text.


April 2011

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 10

Produced with the assistance of Rana Sadik and Samer Younis
Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation.