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

Artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme undertake long-term research projects that center themes of collectivity, resilience, and memory.

Their moving image works, which often sample found video alongside their own footage, poetry, and pulsating soundscapes, are complicated by a concern with gaps and glitches, products of the artists’ reflexive approach to translating fugitive fragments of sound and image. The masks and digital avatars found in their works raise questions of visibility and opacity, and the artists’ use of unnatural and inverted colors implies the limits of the visible light spectrum.

Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s exhibition in the List Visual Arts Center features three bodies of work from the pair’s decade-long project May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2010–ongoing). A recent commission that debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in 2022, Only sounds that tremble through us (2020–22) is a three-channel video installation that expands from the artists’ digital video archive of everyday communal song and dance from diverse communities in the Arab world which they collected from social media. At Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s invitation, one dancer and three electronic musicians use their bodies as samplers and take up varied improvisations in response to the movements, lyrics, or sentiments they observed in these quotidian recordings. Surfacing these ephemeral gestures through reinterpretation, Abbas and Abou-Rahme ask what it means to archive sound and gesture through embodiment and look to song and dance as modes of resilience and repositories of memory.

More information about the List Visual Arts Center exhibition

Schedule

Upcoming Events

Only sounds that tremble through us
MIT List Visual Arts Center
Wiesner Building E15, Atrium Level
20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA
April 4 – July 28, 2024

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

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).