Red Navigapparate (2025) operates as both conceptual apparatus and spatial intervention, constructing and disrupting paths of movement, labour and rootedness. The work extends Rabah’s long-standing engagement with the politics of land, displacement and contestation of dominant historical narratives.
A narrow water channel cuts across the site, traversed by a rigid red metal pipe that both connects and divides. It recalls a water source that once flowed through the garden, while evoking infrastructures of extraction and control: pipelines, borders and the strained flows of water under climate and geopolitical pressures. On one bank, a red manual transpalette is mounted on a green marble pedestal – embodying the paradox of movement under constraint. Opposite, a gridded field of more than 100 red barrels, each placed on red wooden pallets and cradling a mature olive, citrus, or nut tree, forms a provisional nursery. Shaped by the legacy of the former French Orphanage, Red Navigapparate does not merely guide movement – it entangles the viewer in the history of the site.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Khalil Rabah (b. 1961, Jerusalem) is an artist, curator and teacher who lives and works in Ramallah. He is also the founder and artistic director of the ongoing project The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind. Rabah’s interdisciplinary conceptual practice explores displacement, memory and identity through architecture, ecological elements and speculative institutional frameworks. His solo exhibitions include Through the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind, Fondazione Merz, Turin (2024); What is not, Sharjah Art Foundation (2022); Relocation, Among Other Things, Salzburger Kunstverein (2022). Group exhibitions include Desert X AlUla (2022); Lahore Biennale 02 (2020); Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018).
EXHIBITED WORKS
Khalil Rabah (b. 1961)
Red Navigapparate, 2025
Variable materials
Variable dimensions
Courtesy of the artist
