Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme were both born in 1983, in Cyprus and the USA respectively. They live and work between Ramallah and New York. Their collaborative practice spans sound, image, text, installation, and performance, engaging with performativity, political imaginaries, the body, and virtuality. They have had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022), the Art Institute of Chicago (2021), and the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2023). Their work has been included in biennials such as Sharjah (2015, 2023), Berlin (2022), São Paulo and Gwangju (2014), and Venice (2009).
UNTIL WE BECAME FIRE AND FIRE US
2023–ongoing
2023–ongoing
4-channel video, 2-channel sound, subwoofers, steel panels, sublimation prints on chiffon, digital prints on paper
32′14″
Until we became fire and fire us comprises several artworks that recombine each time in new iterations to make a whole. Using an ever-growing collection of projected images and sounds and words collected by the artists, along with textiles and freestanding metal barricades, the work is multilayered. Highly sensorial, it is awash with hues evoking plants: the purple of a thistle, the red of a poppy, along with pink and indigo, sometimes in negative images and retinal afterimages. We hear and see recordings of everyday dancing and singing in places such as Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Yemen, along with new performances conceived by the artists together with a musician and a dancer in Palestine. Interspersed with drawings by Abou-Rahme’s father, Until we became fire and fire us is a lyrical artwork on the loss of communities and land under settler colonialism and genocide—and the loss of loves, selfhood, the ineffable, and ultimately memory. Until we became fire and fire us is also part of their longer-term project May amnesia never kiss you on the mouth (2020–ongoing, mayamnesia.com).
Oh Shining Star Testify, 2016–2019
Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s installation Oh Shining Star Testify considers the entanglement between the destruction of bodies and the erasure of images, as well as the conditions under which these same bodies and images might once again reappear. The work is structured around Israeli military surveillance footage obtained and released by the human rights group B’Tselem. On 19 March 2014, 14 year-old Yusuf Shawamreh crossed the ‘separation fence’ erected by the Israeli military near Hebron. On his way to pick akkoub, an edible plant that is a delicacy of Palestinian cuisine, Israeli forces ambushed him and shot him dead. Oh Shining Star Testify weaves together a fragmented script sampled from online recordings of violent everyday erasures of bodies, land and built structures but also their reappearance through ritualistic song and dance. Whilst reminding us that there are landscapes beyond any notion of accountability, Abbas & Abou-Rahme’s use of these digital fragments prompts us to think about how technologies, particularly the internet, can provide a continued existence for those who have been killed.