Casting into the future by indexing the past: Khalil Rabah and The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind

This paper considers artist Khalil Rabah’s long running, parafictional art project The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (2003–ongoing). Rabah uses exhibition-making strategies and display conventions to satirize the violent worldmaking projects that museums are called upon to uphold. I join visual analysis of Rabah’s artwork with decolonial critiques of the museum and state, specifically Israel. During the decolonial and revolutionary post-World War II context of the mid-twentieth century, many newly sovereign nations opened museums. In the case of the Zionist settler-colonial project, the museum pre-dates the founding of the nation-state, paving the way for future statehood. These museums legitimize the terms of possession so that by the time the nation-state is declared, the argument for its existence was already made. Rabah indexes the historical to envision the future of Palestinian sovereignty and simultaneously interrogates the veracity of the museum as an institution of objective truth.