Jan 22
Artist talk with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Join us for an Artist Talk featuring Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.
The Perlman Teaching Museum’s winter 2025 exhibition Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Only sounds that tremble through us foregrounds modes of resistance across the Arab world.
Working across a range of media — including moving-image installations, sound, performance, and poetry — the artwork centers themes of collectivity, resilience, and memory. The exhibition is designed in close conversation with the artists, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.
Basel Abbas (b. 1983, Nicosia, Cyprus) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b. 1983, Boston, MA) live and work between New York and Palestine and have collaborated since 2007.
Their artwork spans a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Largely their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, 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 multi-media installations and live sound/image performances.
They have had institutional solo exhibitions at, among others, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2023); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022); Common Guild, Glasgow (2022); Migros Museum, Zurich (2022); the Art Institute of Chicago (2021); Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2020); Kunstverein in Hamburg (2018); Art Jameel Project Space Dubai (2017); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2015).
Their work has been included in major international biennials such as the Sharjah Biennial (2023, 2015), the Berlin Biennial (2022), the Busan Biennial (2018), the Gwangju Biennial (2014), the São Paulo Biennial (2014), the Istanbul Biennial (2013), the Liverpool Biennial (2010), and the Venice Biennale (2009).
This exhibition is made possible by Teiger Foundation.