In Turin, for the first time, Khalil Rabah's Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind takes the form of an archaeological site, in which the visitor is invited to immerse himself in a historical narrative rendered through testimonies and clues. In the spaces of the Fondazione Merz, the artist challenges the role of the museum as a mere container and focuses on art as a tool for the interpretation and correction of history. Khalil Rabah's artistic practice ranges between painting, sculpture and installation to construct a lucid and careful analysis of history and its interpretations, questioning their narrative modes and the perception they generate. Fundamental themes such as change, memory and identity intersect in his work, creating new ways of representing communities and relationships. ways of representing communities and the relationships that make them up.

The catalogue accompanies the project conceived by Khalil Rabah for the Fondazione Merz and was created as an extension of the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (PMNHH). Developed as a nomadic museum institution that the artist inaugurated in 2003, Rabah's museum, which includes departments such as geology, botany and palaeontology, has seen several iterations around the world and is identified as a project in constant evolution.

Khalil Rabah is a Palestinian conceptual artist born in Jerusalem in 1961. He studied Architecture and Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Arlington and has resided in the United States for over a decade. His most recent solo exhibitions include Casa Árabe, Madrid (2016); Kunsthaus Hamburg (2015); e-flux, New York (2013); and Beirut Art Center (2012). As well as major group exhibitions, including Manifesta 12 Palermo (2018); Sharjah Biennial (2017); Marrakech Biennial (2016); Kochi-Muziris Biennial (2014); Thessaloniki Biennial (2013); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); Mathaf, Doha (2010); and Venice Biennale (2009). Rabah is the initiator and artistic director of the Riwaq Biennale and a co-founder of the Al Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem. From 2011 to 2015 he served on the curricular committee of Ashkal Alwan's Home Workspace programme in Beirut, Lebanon.

Push the Limits is the volume that ties in with the group exhibition curated at the Fondazione Merz from the 7th of September 2020 to the 26the of February 2021.

The book is more than just a catalogue and illustrates an all-female art project. The curators, Claudia Gioia and Beatrice Merz, invited seventeen internationally renowned artists to take part in Push the Limits: Rosa Barba, Sophie Calle, Katharina Grosse, Shilpa Gupta, Mona Hatoum, Jenny Holzer, Emily Jacir, Bouchra Khalili, Barbara Kruger, Cinthia Marcelle, Shirin Neshat, Maria Papadimitriou, Pamela Rosenkranz, Chiharu Shiota, Fiona Tan, Carrie Mae Weems and Sue Williamson.

Page after page, the reader can immerse himself in the exhibition through the images and essays by the curators and Maura Reilly, Paul Mason and Manuel Borja-Villel, and into the search for a language capable of narrating the present.

In addition to providing further insight into the work on display and the current projects of the seventeen artists, Push the Limits also collects their photographs, drawings, film suggestions, excerpts from books and other suggestions.

A polyphony of signs and experiences whose imagination speaks to us of the ability to bring all those realities that are ‘beyond’ to the threshold of thought: a publishing ‘happening’ of culture and life.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Petrit Halilaj. Shkrepëtima curated by Leonardo Bigazzi and held at Fondazione Merz from 29th October 2018 to 17th February 2019.

“In recent years, Petrit Halilaj has succeeded in transforming his own biography and the recent history of his nation, Kosovo, into living matter for his works. Despite working with a public and collective dimension, his work often originates from a personal experience, and is usually the result of an intimate process shared with the people dearest to him. Using sculpture, video, performance and drawing, Halilaj has developed a deep reflection on the construction mechanisms of cultural identity, on the value of memory and on the role of art in the shaping of collective consciousness in contemporary society.

This small publication has been printed on the occasion of the exhibition Shkrepëtima by Petrit Halilaj (29 October 2018 - 17 February 2019) held at Fondazione Merz.

The Shkrepëtima project presented at the Fondazione Merz continues the artist’s investigation into the historical roots of Runik, the little Kosovar town in which he grew up, from its Neolithic origins to its recent past. The exhibition is the culminating and conclusive moment of the project, entirely produced by the Fondazione Merz. The first and fundamental chapter of the project was the performance held on 7 July 2018 in the ruins of the Runik Culture House, which for over thirty years had been the symbol of the cultural identity of its citizens. This show was followed by another, at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Berne, Switzerland (20 July - 19 August 2018).

The exhibition presents a new series of sculptures and monumental installations that re-contextualise the settings, costumes and stage props of the performance inside the exhibition space. In the work of Halilaj the ruins of the Culture Centre take on a voice to recount history, becoming the expression of a precise will to remember the past in a context in which the desire for removal of memory is very strong. Through his dreamlike and visionary language, Halilaj has achieved a surprising balance between the weight of the history of these fragments and the physical lightness arising from their suspension.

On the 50th anniversary of the protest movements of 1968, this exhibition provides food for thought concerning a period full of creative ferment, which triggered new processes of transformation and renewed vision of the future. The artist experienced this period as a protagonist, together with many of his travelling companions, with the aim of redefining the cultural and ideological canons. The exhibition presents a dozen works created by Merz between 1966 and 1973.

This change involved all the arts, from literature to music, theatre, cinema and, of course, the visual arts, which have seen such significant movements coexist such as minimalism, arte povera, land and conceptual art, simultaneously contrasting the then emerging American art with the European scene. It has generated a climate rich in extraordinary sensitivity, a new existential model based on a constant commitment to the concept, presentation and distribution of the art of one’s own time: breaking through the object, a constant and direct control at all times, a shift of art into life, a passionate, multi-faceted and supporting art.

The exhibition becomes a story, therefore, suspended between the historical, the political and the poetic, a narration that starts from the words of Mario Merz himself and presents some of the most important works of those years that have become icons of his artistic career.

The catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition So as to find the strength to see held at Fondazione Merz from 6th March to 27th May 2018.

“Examining the work of Fatma Bucak is like looking down on a deconstructed map. Here we find trails travelled and then cancelled out, landscapes designed and then abandoned, a geography that continually redraws itself, intertwining facts and biographies, erased events and non-identities. In the artist’s recent work, these landscapes expand from Turkey to Syria and North Africa and then reach Europe and the United States with the aim of investigating a political framework that is particularly difficult to define. The artist’s research can be understood as a constantly evolving visual practice that refers directly to the etymology of the Greek verb prássein, the meaning of which is not limited to making or doing but also picks up the idea of travelling, walking, crossing.” (Lisa Parola, Maria Centonze)

“With characteristic buoyancy of spirit, Bucak called this exhibition So as to find the strength to see. Five years after the fall of the Turkish spring, she wonders if we can smell the roses of a country besieged by forces with conflicting agendas and a shared love of violence. Lands that today reek of gunpowder can once again smell of roses. This is the vision we are asked to find the strength to see.” (Kaya Genç)