Artist
Basel Abbas and Rouanne Abou-Rahme
Title
Until we became fire and fire us
Date
2023
Medium
Two-channel video, two-channel sound and subwoofer, panel. 30’30”
Credit line
Basel Abbas and Rouanne Abou-Rahme, Until we became fire and fire us (installation view), 2023.
Co-commissioned by PCAI in the framework of the organisation’s partnership with the Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present (SB15) in 2023.
Object label
The song is the call and the land is calling
The land is calling the vanished through the song
The land haunts
us And we haunt
them
The shadow, the echo, the ghosts of what remain
Palestine, the loss of our land haunts us. Having been severed from the land we are haunted by it. A forbidden land like a forbidden love.
Until we became fire and fire us explore various forms of hauntings, love stories bound to loss, land and self, forms of imprisonment and the call to get free, with sound and song being at the heart of this exploration.
In it all is a search for a reconnection to a severed broken land, community, history, one that haunts, imprisons and moves us all at once. The project is a mixed media installation with multiple channel sound and video. It formally explores the idea of hauntings in its aural and visual content and the way in which this material appears and disappears into a given space. Sometimes appearing as poetry from a dissonant voice, a broken melody or intense flashes of text and video, or an imprint from a forbidden land, a forbidden love.
This work is part of the wider May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth project.
