Khaled Barakeh is a Syrian multidisciplinary artist whose work links conceptual art to socio-political transformation and institutional practice. Educated in Damascus and later completing postgraduate studies in Odense and Frankfurt, he developed what he calls The Practice of Necessity, a methodological and ethical framework that treats art as a responsive, adaptive system for reshaping how communities remember, organise, and imagine their futures. Working beyond the production of objects, Barakeh approaches creative processes themselves as a medium.

His practice moves across installations, public interventions, participatory structures, and institutional architectures, operating in the charged space between art and administration, authorship and collective agency. His method prioritises systems over objects, civic impact over aesthetic closure, and long-term transformation over symbolic gestures. Each project becomes a site of experimentation, negotiating the real and the fictional, the narrative and the conceptual, the individual and the communal.

His work has been exhibited and collected internationally, and in 2023, he was shortlisted for the Exile Visual Arts Award by Körber-Stiftung and Exilmuseum Berlin. His practice has been supported by funders and programmes including the Ford Foundation, Creative Europe, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), the Cultural Bridge (UK–Germany), the European Cultural Foundation, and the British Council.

Alongside his artistic work, Barakeh collaborates with organisations such as Amnesty International, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), Impunity Watch, the Danish Refugee Council, and Siege Watch, contributing cultural strategies to human rights advocacy and social justice efforts. His writing has appeared in publications including Global Photography: A Critical History (Bloomsbury, 2020) and ECCHR’s Syrian State Torture on Trial (published by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education, 2023).

In 2017, Barakeh founded coculture, a Berlin-based nonprofit conceived as a social sculpture at the intersection of art, creative activism, and community building. coculture supports displaced and underrepresented cultural producers from the Global South, and develops platforms that extend Barakeh’s artistic practice into curation, cultural infrastructure, turning support structures into forms of social, political, and ethical intervention. Long-term initiatives include theindex.art, a transnational mapping platform connecting artists from conflict-affected contexts to global networks. Recently, Barakeh has been preparing for the first Syrian(s) Biennale, with a primary edition in Syria and satellite formats in cities with significant Syrian communities, including Beirut, Istanbul, and Berlin.

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.