The installation Red Navigapparate by the18th Istanbul Biennial artist Khalil Rabah was created in 2025 for the biennial as a site-specific spatial intervention for the garden of the former French Orphanage. Following the biennial, the permanent work, supported by Koç Holding, continued to be exhibited in its original location. Today, it can be seen in the garden of Artİstanbul Feshane.

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. Situated in a secluded corner of the public garden of the Former French Orphanage, the installation invited biennial visitors to move through a structure shaped by barriers, thresholds and conflicting signs – and to encounter obstacles along the way. Engaging with the history of its original site, the work also reflected on the orphanage’s layered past as both a place of refuge and a space of authority.

A gridded field of 99 red barrels, each placed on red wooden pallets and cradling a mature olive, citrus, or nut tree, forms a provisional nursery. A rigid red metal pipe recalls a water source that once flowed through the garden of the former orphanage, 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. 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.

Tree species: Apple, Angelica Plum, August Papaz Plum, Black Grape, Cherry, Date, Deveci Pear, Dwarf Apple, Fig, Grafted Mulberry, Green Apple, Hawthorn, Jujube, Lemon, Loquat, Malta Plum, Medlar, Mürdüm Plum, Olive, Ornamental Apple, Ornamental Cherry, Ornamental Pear, Pomegranate, Quince, Wild Olive, Mulberry

Aromatic plant species: Blackberry, Mint, Rosemary, Sage, Scented Geranium, Thyme

Khalil Rabah

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).