PCAI Collection artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme are currently presenting their exhibition Until We Became Fire and Fire Us at coleção moraes-barbosa in Sao Paolo, Brazil. 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.
Journalist and critic Oliver Basciano notes: “On the gallery floor, between the two projections of Until we became fire and fire us (2023–ongoing), stand metal barricades, like sections of a security border, on which printed frames from the film are attached. Above, sheer fabric banners hang, printed from further images culled from the video. To one side, copies of a newspaper—the New York War Crimes, mimicking the design of the New York Times—are piled up on a pair of bricks and available for the visitor to take away. It tells a century-old story of Palestinian struggle and Israeli aggression through a succession of commissioned texts.[…] Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s work traces the total dematerialization of a community, its presence left only to memory, and reveals a landscape burned to the ground, cacti sprouting where once people lived. “The land will testify,” read the fragmentary text that subtitles the film, in purple English and Arabic text. “Where there is violence there is always a trace. An echo buried.” The video pans to the beach and car park where the village once lay. The aerial footage appears in negative, like an x-ray of a modern settlement beneath which trauma lies.”
Basel Abbas and Rouanne Abou-Rahme’s Until We Became Fire and Fire Us was a 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.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Largely their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, objects and recasting them into altogether new ‘scripts’. The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multi-media installations and live sound/image performances
Image credit: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Until We Became Fire and Fire Us, 2023-ongoing. Seven-channel video; 32:00 minutes, six channel sound piece, sublimation prints on fabric, dimensions variable, seven steel panels, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of coleção moraes-barbosa, Sao Paolo. Photo by Ding Musa.
Activity aligned with Goals 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17
