"The 3rd Annual Wall Zone Auction" Khalil Rabah - March 2004

Saturday March 13th at 6pm saw the presentation, at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, of the "The 3rd Annual Wall Zone Auction", which is an operational concept organized by the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind. The Museum, which was supposedly established in 1929, was conceived by the artist Khalil Rabah.

The Museum's work focuses on carrying out research, dissemination of knowledge through publications, educational projects and exhibits, the auction being its latest yet. This event was organized for the purpose of creating alternative encounters that will become a catalyst in order to dematerialize the art object and deconstruct the cultural, civil, economical and of course political discourse.

In its attempt to explore the story of our planet, the Museum and especially the Third Annual Wall Zone Auction celebrate the life of the olive tree as an embodiment of the Museum of the mind. 
 

Khalil Rabah, the founder of the Museum and the organizer of this auction, had adopted the olive tree since the beginning of his artistic journey. It has been a constant reference in his work, such as the time he transferred some olive trees from Palestine to Geneva where he replanted them in the yard of the United Nations headquarters, as an art form that lives and grows incessantly. He even exhibited transparent glasses of olive oil in Korea and poured oil in a single vessel surrounded by gilded barbed wire placed in Jerusalem. He even cast an olive tree on a hospital bed in an Intensive Care Unit in Cairo. These are not coincidental incidents; especially in a time where thousands of olive trees are being uprooted, in order to build by-pass roads, settlements and lastly the wall.

Khalil Rabah, born in 1961, is considered to be a pioneer of the Palestinian Visual Arts movement especially in the field of conceptual, installation and performance art. His art works are characterized by permeating a sense of awareness and showing off advanced technicality, which usually mirrors personal existentialist issues.
 

Rabah has started exhibiting immediately after receiving a BA from Texas University in Architecture & Fine Arts. He has exhibited both locally, such as in Jerusalem and Ramallah, and internationally, like Amman, Paris, Buenos Aires and Korea.