Khaled Barakeh is a Syrian-born, Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist, activist, and civic systems designer whose work bridges conceptual art, social transformation, and institutional imagination. Trained in Damascus, Odense, and Frankfurt, he developed what he terms The Practice of Necessity—a methodological and ethical framework that positions art not as representation, but as a responsive, adaptive system for reconfiguring how communities remember, organise, and envision their futures.

Barakeh’s practice moves beyond the production of objects to treat creative processes themselves as a medium. His works—spanning installations, interventions, participatory structures, and institutional architectures—operate in the charged space between art and administration, authorship and collective agency. Each project becomes a site of experimentation, negotiating the real and the fictional, the narrative and the conceptual, the individual and the communal. His method prioritises systems over objects, civic impact over aesthetic closure, and long-term transformation over symbolic gestures.

In 2017, Barakeh founded coculture, a Berlin-based nonprofit conceived as a social sculpture at the intersection of art, activism, and community building. coculture develops infrastructures for cultural resilience and collective authorship, supporting displaced and underrepresented cultural producers from the Global South, particularly those affected by conflict, exile, or systemic erasure. Through coculture, Barakeh builds platforms—both digital and physical—that function as extensions of his artistic practice, transforming cultural support structures into forms of social, political, and ethical intervention.

His internationally recognised projects—including MUTE (2020), a public intervention staged during the Koblenz trial on Syrian state torture—exemplify his commitment to art as both intervention and testimony. In this work, dozens of silent figures dressed in clothing donated by Syrian families and activists formed a standing demonstration in front of the courthouse, bearing witness to atrocities that demanded global attention. Like many of Barakeh’s works, MUTE transforms absence into presence, trauma into public memory, and art into an instrument of civic witnessing.

Barakeh’s works have been exhibited and collected by major museums and biennales worldwide, including the Shanghai Biennale, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Dom Museum Vienna, Busan Biennale, Salt Istanbul, Kunsthalle Wien, and others. In 2023, he was shortlisted for the Exile Visual Arts Award by Körber-Stiftung and Exilmuseum Berlin, recognising his contribution to cultural production shaped by displacement, resistance, and institutional innovation.

Alongside his artistic practice, Barakeh collaborates with organisations such as Amnesty International, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and Impunity Watch, where he contributes cultural strategies to human rights advocacy, legal documentation, and transnational justice efforts. His writing on the intersection of art and justice has been featured in major publications, including ECCHR’s Syrian State Torture on Trial (2023).

Barakeh’s current work expands into large-scale civic prototyping in post-collapse contexts, most notably Little Syria, a multi-year initiative in the town of Jaramana on the outskirts of Damascus. Little Syria reimagines alternative governance, professional organisation, and communal trust in the absence of functional state institutions. Drawing from design thinking, participatory governance, and socially engaged art, Barakeh collaborates with local communities to co-create decentralised professional collectives—self-organised cells of civic capacity that operate as a living, adaptive ecosystem rather than a conventional institution.

Within this ecosystem, projects such as Pharmakon State—a site-specific exhibition staged in the former Drug Control Centre and developed collaboratively across art, legal, and music collectives—examine the entangled relationships between war economies, narcotics, legality, and social repair. These interventions function as civic laboratories, where artistic, legal, and communal knowledge co-produce new forms of public engagement, future-oriented ethics, and shared responsibility.

Parallel to this, Barakeh is establishing a new cultural organisation inside Syria, envisioned as the sister institution to coculture in Berlin. This organisation aims to support locally grounded cultural infrastructures as the country transitions—however slowly or unpredictably—into a post-authoritarian landscape. Among its long-term projects are the development of the first Syrian Biennale inside Syria and the activation of theindex.art, a transnational cultural infrastructure connecting artists from conflict zones to global networks of opportunity, visibility, and solidarity.

Collectively, Barakeh’s initiatives reconstruct social fabrics fractured by dictatorship, war, and displacement—positioning artistic practice as a tool for collective agency, memory repair, and the rehearsal of future civic possibilities. His work asks not only how art can intervene in political realities, but how it can prototype new ones.