Rayyane Tabet: Exquisite Corpse

The exhibition brings together newly commissioned and re-conceived presentations from “Fragments“(2016–ongoing), the artist’s most ambitious project to date. Drawing on personal insight and historical records to stage encounters between audiences and matters of geopolitical consequence, the body of work explores an archaeological excavation led by German diplomat Baron Max von Oppenheim in Tell Halaf, northeast Syria, at the turn of the twentieth century.

Tabet has developed works that engages with family heirlooms and archaeological artefacts through accidents of history—across time, generations and continents. Taken together, this project intimates the wide-ranging fallout of an era that looms large over current discussions of cultural appropriation, museological practice and freedom of movement.