2022–2024 Jane Lombard Fellow Khalil Rabah founded the semi-fictional Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind, a roving museum dedicated to generating interest in the natural and cultural history of Palestine, while also recognizing the futility of this gesture. Considered an ongoing project in institutional critique, the museum challenges and mocks nationalistic representation and museology, while also being an impossible and earnest attempt at portraying a Palestinian experience and state of being.

Originally planned as a conversation with curator Fawz Kabra, Rabah’s program Impossible Structures, presented at the Vera List Center Forum 2023: Correction* was halted in the wake of the violence in Israel and Palestine. Kabra provides an introduction to a series of four films by Rabah—I want to be with you (1998), Body and Sole (1995), Critical Interrogations [Renewed belief] (1999), and A this and that (1997)—and discusses the materiality of art making under the conditions of occupation. “The Institutional History of the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind is cubist in its impossibility,” writes Rabah in his artist statement on Correction*.  “It is occupied, exiled at home, and everywhere abroad. An entirely new place, it rests nowhere while waiting for our return.”