After eight years away, Palestinian artist Khalil Rabah has returned to Beirut with Some other things ruled it, a two-part solo exhibition presented simultaneously across Sfeir-Semler Gallery’s Karantina and Downtown spaces. Opened on 26 August 2026, the exhibition brings together new works and new iterations of ongoing projects, continuing Rabah’s long-standing exploration of objects, materials, memory and the systems that give things meaning.

At the Karantina space, Rabah transforms familiar household objects into an unsettling labyrinth of strange encounters. Tables, tools, furniture and discarded materials are removed from their everyday functions and brought together in unexpected configurations. A greenhouse becomes a place where plants are left to wither; overturned tables are covered with sharp nails; rusted saws emerge from colourful tarps; and barbed wire sits between ornate chandeliers. Elsewhere, an ironing board is placed inside a display case beneath a collection of surveillance cameras facing the gallery entrance.

The objects remain recognizable, yet their meanings begin to shift.

Rabah’s approach recalls the legacy of Dada and Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, but here the objects do more than simply move from everyday life into the gallery. Their histories and associations remain present while their original purposes disappear. A chair is still a chair, a hammer is still a hammer, but their new relationships make them difficult to read in familiar ways.

The installation becomes a kind of living archive without a fixed order, where objects are collected, stacked, displayed, concealed and rearranged. Everything appears to belong to a system, yet the system itself remains impossible to fully decipher. This tension between recognition and incomprehension lies at the heart of the exhibition.

In the Downtown space, Rabah turns to works on paper, continuing his exploration of repetition, rupture and repair. From his home in Ramallah, he draws the trunks of cut olive trees, gradually transforming them into forms that suggest severed body parts and organic shapes. The drawings are made with bright wax sticks before being torn apart and reassembled, creating a physical cycle of destruction and reconstruction.

These works are presented alongside a monumental Palestinian thob, assembled from worn traditional dresses collected from grandmothers and women in different Palestinian villages. The piece becomes both an homage to womanhood and motherhood and a vessel of memory, carrying traces of people, places and generations.

Across both spaces, Some other things ruled it explores what happens when familiar things are displaced, broken, repaired or transformed. Rather than simply documenting what has been destroyed or discarded, Rabah asks how objects—and the meanings attached to them—can be reorganized.

Now on view across Sfeir-Semler Gallery’s Karantina and Downtown locations in Beirut, the exhibition offers a reflection on transformation: what is lost when things change, and what new possibilities might emerge in their place.