Khaled Barakeh is a Berlin-based conceptual artist and cultural activist. Driven by his observations of longstanding social injustice, Barakeh approaches art as a tool for societal change and as a...
Khaled Barakeh is a Berlin-based conceptual artist and cultural activist. Driven by his observations of longstanding social injustice, Barakeh approaches art as a tool for societal change and as a vehicle to undermine stagnant power structures. In Exile, a reworked emergency exit lightbox, Barakeh plays with the familiarity of objects, signs that surround us, and how we perceive their presence.
In I Haven’t Slept for Centuries,Barakeh compiles his granted visas, passed checkpoints and denials into a single page. After years of unceasing movement between countries, the accumulated mass of evidence outweighs the original identity encoded in the passport. As the layers of ink become more and more opaque, it is
increasingly obscured, a tiny fraction disappearing with each stamp.
Barakeh graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus, Syria in 2005, and completed a MFA at Funen Art Academy in Odense, Denmark (2010) and a Meisterschuler study at the Städelschule Art Academy in Frankfurt, Germany (2013). In 2017, he developed coculture, a not-for-profit organisation that manages initiatives that leverage artistic thinking to directly address issues of contemporary mass migration. Among these projects is the SYRIA Cultural Index and the Syrian Biennale. Barakeh has exhibited at Hamburger Kunsthalle, the 11th Shanghai Biennale, The Frankfurter Kunstverein, and the Busan Biennale, among many others.