Khaled Barakeh is a conceptual artist and a cultural activist, born in 1976 in the suburbs of Damascus, Syria, and today living and working in Berlin. He graduated from the Damascus Faculty of Fine Arts in 2005. He decided then to pursue his training at the Funen Art Academy in Odense, Denmark where he received his MFA. In 2013 he obtained a Meisterschüler degree at the Städelschule Art Academy in Frankfurt, Germany.

After moving to Europe, Khaled Barakeh, who was initially a painter, began experimenting with new artistic practices. While his life and personal experiences are powerfully expressed in his work, he transcends the subjective to attain a universal dimension. In his 2015 installation On the Ropes, he suspended all the furnishings of the studio where he lived and worked, raising them to 15 cm above the floor, to express the intense distress and vulnerability he felt on arriving in Berlin after several previous moves. This piece, which has since been updated and recreated in several different exhibition spaces including the Malakoff Maison des Arts in 2019, is filmed each time and thus becomes a “work in progress” that invites the visitor to experience the sense of fragility one experiences in a world that seems to stand on shifting sands. In the work IKB (2015), which is also related to the feeling of being uprooted, the artist signals his successive places of residence by painting each building’s roof blue – a shade resembling Klein Blue, the colour favoured by the well-known artist Yves Klein. These works, which combine conceptual art, urban interventionism, and the latest technology, are accessible from anywhere in the world via Google Maps. For the artist, they are a way of keeping track of the nomadic life that has been forced on him.

Often sarcastic and even darkly humorous, Khaled Barakeh’s works offer a commentary on exile and the constant ambiguities engendered by the situation. In the installation Isomerisation (2010), which he produced and presented in Denmark while he was living there, visitors were offered falafel sandwiches wrapped in paper bearing the printed portraits of immigrants living nearby. In a subtle mise en abyme, the sandwiches were arranged on the tables in a shape reminiscent of the Danish flag. Directly linked to the tragic events in Syria, Relentless Images (2018) used the archives of the Syrian military defector whose code-name is Caesar. With this installation, the artist points the process of dehumanisation acts reducing these images of the deceased to their digital metadata.

A defender of “artivism”, Khaled Barakeh believes the mission of art is not to state a given truth, but rather to question truth. In a recent major shift in his practice, Barakeh founded the non-profit association coculture in 2017. With many initiatives including SYRIA Cultural Index, the Syrian Biennale, and Support the Supporters, coculture is focussed on addressing the many challenges faced by displaced cultural producers in the Middle East, Europe, and beyond.

Barakeh has exhibited at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, The 11th Shanghai Biennale, Salt Istanbul, The Frankfurter Kunstverein, Artspace New Zealand, The Busan Biennale, The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, and many other international venues and instituations.

Dunia AL DAHAN

Marie-Laure BERNADAC

Oksana KARPOVETS

Paula AISEMBERG

Véronique BOURUET-AUBERTOT

Nora PHILIPPE

Daria de BEAUVAIS

Stéphanie COTTIN

Elena SOROKINA