Khaled Barakeh is a multidisciplinary artist, cultural systems designer and producer whose work bridges 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 and ethical framework that positions art as a responsive, adaptive system for reconfiguring how communities remember, organise, and envision their futures.Working beyond the production of objects, Barakeh approaches creative processes 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. A key project, MUTE (2020), took the form of a silent public demonstration staged during the Koblenz trial on Syrian state torture. His practice has been supported by funders and programmes including the Ford Foundation, the European Cultural Foundation, AFAC – Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, Cultural Bridge (UK–Germany), the British Council, and Creative Europe.

Alongside his artistic work, Barakeh collaborates with organisations such as Amnesty International, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and Impunity Watch, contributing cultural strategies to human rights advocacy and transnational 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 cultural infrastructure, turning support structures into forms of social, political, and ethical intervention. In 2026, he established a sister organisation in Damascus to strengthen locally rooted cultural ecosystems.

Barakeh’s current work extends to civic prototyping in post-collapse contexts, most notably in Little Syria, a multi-year initiative that reimagines alternative governance, professional organisation, and communal trust in the absence of functional state institutions. One of the project's early activities is the Pharmakon State, a site-specific exhibition staged in the former Drug Control Centre that examines the entangled relationships among war economies, narcotics, legality, and social repair.

Long-term initiatives include theindex.art, a transnational mapping platform connecting artists from conflict-affected contexts to global networks. Recently, Barakeh has also been appointed Director and Curator of the first Syrian(s) Biennale, which will be developed in partnership with Syria’s Ministry of Culture, with a primary edition in Syria and satellite formats in cities with significant Syrian communities, including Beirut, Istanbul, and Berlin.