PCAI is glad to announce that PCAI collection artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme will present their first exhibition in the Spanish state. Prisoners of Love. Until the Sun of Freedom will be on display at MACBA from 13 February to 28 September 2026 and is curated by Hiuwai Chu, Head of Exhibitions and Curator at the museum.
Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom centres on the eponymous audiovisual installation, informed by most recent research of the artists, which explores the resilience of former Palestinian prisoners through song and poetry. The work is co-commissioned by MACBA, Nottingham Contemporary, The Bell/Brown Arts Institute, Brown University, and Kunstinstituut Melly, and forms part of the MACBA Collection.
Presented alongside earlier works, the exhibition traces a trajectory across nearly two decades of practice, revealing a sustained engagement with the poetics and politics of memory, and with struggles against dispossession and oppression in Palestine and beyond.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme live and work between New York and Ramallah. Of Palestinian descent, they have collaborated since 2007 on projects that integrate image, sound, text and performance. Through the compilation, sampling and superimposition of found and original materials, their multidisciplinary practice excavates, activates and re-situates histories of violence and disenfranchisement, questioning the ways in which we configure, remember and imagine the present.
They have been included in Art Review’s Power 100 and will be featured in the upcoming Whitney Biennial in New York. They have presented solo exhibitions at institutions such as Copenhagen Contemporary (2024), Astrup Fearnley Museet (2023), the Museum of Modern Art (2022), The Common Guild, Glasgow (2022), the Art Institute of Chicago (2021), the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2020), the Kunstverein, Hamburg (2018), and the Art Jameel Project Space, Dubai (2017). Their work has also been featured in major international biennials such as the Sharjah Biennial (2023, 2015), the Berlin Biennale (2022), the Busan Biennale (2018), the Gwangju Biennale and the São Paulo Biennale (both in 2014), the Istanbul Biennial (2013), the Liverpool Biennial (2010), and the Venice Biennale (2009).
More information here.
Image credits: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, still from “Prisoners of Love”, 2025. Courtesy of the artists.
Activity aligned with Goals 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17
