Khairullah Rahim is an artist working across installation, object-making, drawing, and time-based media. He received his MFA in Visual Arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University (New Jersey, 2023), and currently serves as an adjunct lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.

His research and artistic practice navigates queerness, poz resilience, and working-class vernaculars through strategies of resourcefulness and survival shaped by regimes of surveillance. Critiquing the ethics of legibility and disclosure, his work foregrounds opacity as a critical and protective mode of representation. Through collaborative and research-led methodologies, he attends to veiled narratives within his community, examining the entanglements of desire, labour, ambition, resistance, and safety. Materially, his work experiments with the sheen, reflection, and refraction of synthetic polymers—most prominently through the use of rhinestones—mobilising beauty and humour as persuasive tactics that complicate vulnerability, desire, and critique.

He has undertaken artist residencies at IASPIS (Stockholm), the Goethe-Institut (Singapore), Salzburger Kunstverein (Salzburg), Facebook (Singapore), the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts (Wuhan), Taipei Artist Village (Taipei), and YOUKOBO (Tokyo). His work has been presented at venues including the Historic Hampton House (Miami), the Barbican Centre (London), Tai Kwun (Hong Kong), CCA (Glasgow), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (New York), the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, and the National Gallery Singapore, among others. Significant projects include the 6th Singapore Biennale (Gillman Barracks, Singapore), curated by Patrick Flores, Silent Hands (Hayy Jameel, Jeddah), curated by Rotana Shaker, Zain Al Saie, and Jean Wong; and HIV Science as Art (Brainlab, Munich), curated by Daniel Cordner and Jessica Whitbread. Khairullah is a recipient of the IMPART Award for Visual Arts (2017), and his works are held in the collections of the Singapore Art Museum and the SUNPRIDE Foundation.

khairullahrahim@gmail.com
@khairullahrahim