UNTIL WE BECAME FIRE AND FIRE US

Multi-channel video and audio color sound

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film for the exhibition Nebula 2024. Co-produced by Sharjah Art Foundation and co-commissioned by Polygreen Culture and Art Initiative (PCAI) for the Sharjah Biennial 15 2023. Courtesy of the artists and Fondazione In Between Art Film

BASEL ABBAS AND RUANNE ABOU-RAHME

currently live and work between Ramallah and New York. Solo presentations of their work have been held at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centraal Museum, Utrecht; Kunstverein Hamburg; Tale of A Tub, Rotterdam; Krannert Art Museum, Champaign (IL); Protocinema at Alt Bomonti, Istanbul; ICA, Philadelphia; Office for Contemporary Art, Oslo; Jameel Art Center, Dubai; and Delfina Foundation, London. Selected group exhibitions include Sharjah Biennial (2023); Berlin Biennale (2022); The Mistake Room, Los Angeles; Seoul International Media Art Biennale (2016); Kunsthalle Wien; ICA, London; Darat al Funun, Amman; São Paulo Biennial (2014); Gwangju Biennale (2014); Istanbul Biennial (2013). They were recipients of the Open Society Foundations fellowship, New York, in 2020–21, and they were artists in residence at Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, in 2023. Their current project May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020–) is being released in three parts with Dia Art Foundation as part of their Artist Web Projects.

Since 2023, this work has entangled disrupted lands and fragmented communities as lively witnesses, as absent presences through which otherwise suppressed or lost stories survive and re-enter the fabric of reality. For this new adaptation, the artists respond to the original purpose of the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto—which was a shelter for both the poor and the sick for four centuries—and fold in the drawings created by Abou-Rahme’s father in Jerusalem in the 1970s and ’80s, to reflect on past and current forms of dispossession and erasure in Palestine. In and out of a string of rooms, arrangements of words, sounds, images, and lights progressively accumulate and dissipate. Their non-linear, poetic ebb and flow is an invitation for the viewers to make sense of the visual, sonic, physical, and environmental components of the installation through the sensory experiences it offers. From indigenous plants that resist uprooting, to ancient stones that resurface from colonial concrete, to sites where violent events and sparks of freedom occurred, to song lyrics about love and loss or traditional dances performed across the diaspora, the work rekindles the traces of alienated existences and transforms them into an intergenerational means for spiritual and bodily reconnection as much as for historical reconstruction. Sampled from a growing archive of materials that the artists have been co-authoring, compiling and remixing since 2010, these dizzyingly scattered––albeit engulfing––narratives appear, only to then disappear, at times merging with one another by means of sensuous layerings and distortions. Their distinctive textural engagement with the space points towards a form of reciprocity between who is watching and who is watched, who is haunting and who is haunted. This work is part of the wider project May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020–ongoing) which, through the prism of performance, looks at how communities bear witness to and weather experiences of brutality and displacement.