Nine Works, 17/31/7/1999

Khalil Rabah's art challenges norms and artistic conventions of this Palestinian predecessors, and certainly his colleagues. His work falls in the center of the contemporary world art scene, but is at the same time "a relentless, and to a certain extent, endless investigation of his own cultural identity. " Being [art of a nation immersed in a long struggle for self-determination, his works seem in odd contrast, and sometimes perhaps, in conflict with his surroundings. Ironically though, this contrast is what brings his work closer to home than many people believe. "In his work, rabah oscillates between self-discovery and the treatment of the fissure and disparity between realities of the situation in Palestine and the life he aspires for. He tries to envelop and conceal the acuteness of his wound, sometimes with painstaking meticulousness and sensitivity, and other times with singular mercilessness and violence. Obscuring the surface of the objects he works with or even obliterating them (using plaster - Band Aid - and nails) alludes to the internal instability of a person permanently seeking to define his identity and a place to settle in.

Rabah's work eludes the semiotics of contemporary art discourse for exactly the same reason that it eludes the Palestinian and Arab discourse. His Palestinian origin, returning to makes it difficult for contemporary art critics to see, for example, rabah's peeled face covered with medical plaster as merely a reference to "plastic surgery, virtual physiognomis, the dictatorship of images of youth and beauty, or the symbols of social status that are integral to recent discourse on peels, skins, cover, and representation", because in the Palestinian context they are also a reference to the wounded, precarious state of the Palestinian people. Similarly, his ironic and sometimes starkly cruel use of objects generally romanticized in the Palestinian mind makes it difficult to understand the concept behind Rabah's ingenious molding of memory. Persons, fabrics. Old artifacts, and simply things, things of life.