Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

2023-24 CAST Visiting Artist

Exhibition view of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme's An echo buried deep deep down but calling still. © Astrup Fearnley Museet, 2023. Photo: Christian Øen.

Considering embodied memory through sound, video, and performance

About the Project

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s exhibition at the List Visual Arts Center takes shape as a multi-channel sound and video installation, offering a new site-specific iteration of May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020–ongoing).

This multipart project joins fragments of communal song and dance—which the artists collected from videos posted on social media over the past decade in Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen—with new filmic performances created by the artists with dancer Rima Baransi and electronic musicians Haykal, Julmud, and Makimakkuk, who respond to specific gestures, music, or texts from the archive.

In looking at ephemeral performances in politically marginalized parts of the world and asking what it means to archive sound and gesture through embodiment, Abbas and Abou-Rahme reveal performance to be both a critical space of resistance and an ever-evolving repository of memory.

In addition to their List Center exhibition, Abbas and Abou-Rahme will present a two-day performance series with support from a CAST Visiting Artist Grant.

More information about the List Visual Arts Center exhibition

Schedule

Upcoming Events

May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth
MIT List Visual Arts Center
Wiesner Building E15, Atrium Level
20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA

Exhibition on display October 27, 2023 – March 3, 2024

Artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme present a new site-specific installation and performance series in the Hayden Gallery at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. More information.

Performance: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
February 2024

Details forthcoming

Biography

Basel Abbas (b. Nicosia, Cyprus, 1983) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b. Boston, USA, 1983) work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation, and performance practices at the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body, and virtuality. Across their works, they probe a contemporary landscape marked by a seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless “present” that is shaped by the politics of desire and disaster. They have been developing a body of work that questions this suspension of the present and searches for ways in which an altogether different imaginary and language can emerge that is not bound within colonial/capitalist narrative and discourse. In their projects, they find themselves excavating, activating, and inventing incidental narratives, figures, gestures, and sites as material for reimagining the possibilities of the present.

In the process of reflecting on ideas of nonlinearity in the form of returns, amnesia, and deja vu, they unfold the slippages between actuality and projection (fiction, myth, and wish), what is and what could be. Largely, their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, and objects, and recasting them into altogether new “scripts.” The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text, and site, taking on the form of multimedia installations and live sound/image performances.

Website: baselandruanne.com
Social: Vimeo

Collaborators at MIT

Natalie Bell is curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, where she recently organized solo exhibitions of Leslie Thornton and Sreshta Rit Premnath, and is preparing solo exhibitions of Matthew Angelo Harrison and Raymond Boisjoly. She was previously associate curator at the New Museum, New York, where she curated and co-curated over a dozen solo exhibitions. She also co-curated several major group exhibitions at the New Museum, including Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (2017); The Keeper (2016), and Here and Elsewhere (2014).

Website: nataliebell.org
Social: Instagram