Artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme undertake long-term research projects that center themes of collectivity, resistance, 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 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 on view as a three-channel video installation that expands from the artists’ digital video archive of everyday people singing and dancing in communal spaces across Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. For May amnesia, which takes its title from Roberto Bolaño’s 1976 “Infrarealist Manifesto,” the artists developed new performances in Palestine with electronic musicians Makimakkuk, Haykal, Julmud, and dancer Rima Baransai, who responded to specific gestures, music, or texts from the artist’s video archive. Surfacing these ephemeral gestures through reinterpretation, Abbas and Abou-Rahme examine voice and embodiment—through song, oral poetry, and dance—as political modes of manifestation and becoming in a moment marked by various forms of violence against entire living fabrics.