Khaled Barakeh

A Syrian multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin whose practice moves between conceptual art, social transformation, and institutional imagination. Educated in Damascus and later holding postgraduate degrees from institutions in Odense and Frankfurt, he developed what he calls The Practice of Necessity, a methodological framework that positions art as an adaptive system responding to collective and personal urgencies.

Among others, Barakeh collaborates with organisations such as Amnesty International, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), the Danish Refugee Council, and Impunity Watch, contributing cultural strategies to human rights advocacy and social justice efforts. His practice has been supported by funders and programmes including the Ford Foundation, Creative Europe, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC). His writing has appeared in publications including Politics of Visual Arts in a Changing World (Columbia University, 2026), Global Photography: A Critical History (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Syrian State Torture on Trial (German Federal Agency for Civic Education, 2023).

In 2026, coculture established a twinning partnership with ثقافة مشتركة (Thaqafa Mushtaraka), a new sister institution in Damascus also founded by Barakeh. Its name is the literal Arabic translation of coculture. The partnership supports locally rooted cultural production and institution-building while sustaining reciprocal collaboration across Syria and its diasporas, without positioning any geography as the centre or relegating others to the periphery.

Barakeh's work has been collected and exhibited internationally.

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