PCAI is glad to announce that a new adaptation of the work “Until we became fire and fire us” (2023–ongoing), by PCAI collection artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme will be featured in the exhibition Nebula at the Fondazione in Between Art Film. “Until we became fire and fire us” (2023–ongoing) was 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 & Art Initiative for the Sharjah Biennial 15.
In their work, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme explore the political, visceral, and material possibilities of sound, image, text, installation, and performance by sampling both existing and self-authored materials into new ‘scripts.’ Their work reflects on ideas of non-linearity in the form of returns, amnesia and déjà vu, and questions the cancellation of the future while searching for ways in which an altogether different imaginary and language can emerge.
Nebula, will open to the public on April 17, 2024, at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto on the occasion of the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. The group show is curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi—respectively artistic director and curator at Fondazione In Between Art Film.
More about the artists
Basel Abbas (1983, Cyprus) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (1983, USA) 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.
More about the exhibition
Nebula, the Latin word for “cloud” or “fog,” is the second chapter of a series of exhibitions organized by the Fondazione in Venice that began with Penumbra in 2022 and explores states of vision and extra-visual perception. The Fondazione returns to the same venue, the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, this time transforming its spaces into a sensory architecture, incorporating the Church of Santa Maria dei Derelitti, the frescoed concert room and the old pharmacy, as well as unveiling a previously unseen wing of the modern retirement home.
The works in “Nebula” touch upon a range of themes: the vastness of the landscape as the site of either loss or salvation; the architecture of memory, and the labyrinth of consciousness; music and voice as conduits of reclamation. They explore further forms of fragmentation: the tension between being and disappearing, and between living together and estrangement; the reverberation of History within individual lives; and the impact of economic and political forces on the environment and on people’s lives.
Image: Portrait courtesy of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Activity aligned with Goals 4, 8, 11, 17
