Our Room for Reading at 5 Florence Street offers further reading on the current project, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s ‘May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth’.
Selected by the artists and The Common Guild team, publications are available to browse during opening hours and where possible, made available online via the links below.
‘Out There’ edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West; Fred Moten, ‘In the Break’.
To accompany ‘May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth’ we have selected two publications that relate to and have influenced Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s project.
The first of these, ‘In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition’ (2003) by the academic and poet Fred Moten is the inaugural volume in an ambitious intellectual project to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition. It is a challenging and provocative investigation into performance and the connections between improvisatory jazz, radical black politics and identity which in turn addresses loss, trauma and mourning. For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint and through jazz musicians including John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Charles Mingus and others, Moten argues that all black performance—culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself—is improvisation.
The compendium ‘Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture’ edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West (1992) addresses the theme of cultural marginalisation - the process whereby various groups are excluded from access to and participation in the dominant culture. Thinking about culture and representation, all of the texts deal with questions of representation, encompassing not just the visual but also the social and psychological aspects of cultural identity. ‘Out there’ includes essays by bell hooks, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and brings together voices from many different marginalised groups - groups that are often isolated from each other as well as from the dominant culture.
Read Fred Moten, ‘In the break’ here.
Read three essays featured in ‘Out There’: Douglas Crimp, ‘Mourning and Militancy’ (1989); Audre Lorde, ‘Age, race, class, and sex : women redefining difference’ (1980); Toni Morrison, ‘The Site of Memory’ (1992).
Edward W. Said, ‘After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives’ (1999)
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme have selected 'After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives' (1999) by Edward W. Said and their own publication, ‘And yet my mask is powerful’ (2016).
In 1983 photographer Jean Mohr was commissioned by the UN, on Edward Said’s recommendation, to take photos of some of the key sites in which Palestinians lived their lives. Because the UN allowed only minimal text to accompany the photographs, Said and Mohr decided to work together on an 'interplay', as Said put it, of Said's personal account of Palestinian suffering and exile, and Mohr's photographs.
‘After the Last Sky’ combines Said’s personal reflections—on exile, the plight of the Palestinians, how they have been represented by others, and how they struggle to represent themselves—with photographs Mohr took of Palestinians over the course of several decades.
'And Yet My Mask is Powerful' emerges from a 2016 exhibition of the same name held at Carroll / Fletcher in London. The project addresses the apocalyptic logic of perpetual crisis that characterises the contemporary moment. The artists visit destroyed villages in occupied Palestine, documenting groups of Palestinian youths wearing copies of Neolithic masks. These masks, some of the oldest in the world, were originally found in the West Bank and are now stored in private Israeli collections. They have been copied and 3D-printed by the artists from online exhibition photographs.
Read The New York Times’ review of After the Last Sky here.
Watch excerpts from Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme's project ‘And yet my mask is powerful’ here.
Details
In conjunction with our projects, exhibitions and events, Room for Reading offers artists we work with an opportunity to contribute to The Common Guild library and share the books and resources that have influenced their artistic practice.
Every artist’s selection is added to The Common Guild’s expansive reference library of artist books, catalogues, and cultural and critical theory.
Open –
9 September – 9 October 2022
Thursday – Sunday, 12–6pm
Free Entry
