‘May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth’ (2020-ongoing) by the New York and Ramallah-based artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme is an evolving multipart project featuring sound, moving-image installation and live performance.

The project foregrounds Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s remarkable personal archive of found video clips and ephemeral recorded footage, collected by the artists since the early 2010s and the beginning of the Arab Revolutions. Posted online and on social media by ordinary people living in and around Palestine, Iraq and Syria, the video clips, often ad hoc and recorded on mobile devices, focus on song, dance, protest and performance – affirmative acts of vocalisation and physical gesture.

This collected material forms the foundation of Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s multi-layered installation 'Only sounds that tremble through us' (2022). The digital traces of these performing bodies are brought together with new performances created by the artists with dancer Rima Baransi and musicians Haykal, Julmud, and Makimakkuk, working in Ramallah, Palestine. Footage is looped, manipulated and superimposed upon images that include solarised landscapes and destroyed dwellings. Projections are rhythmic and augmented with a fragmentary script in both Arabic and English, detailing experiences of violence, trauma, displacement and resistance. The sound, composed by the artists, shifts between the solo voice, singing dirge-like, and a reverberating audio, heavy with bass notes. As sound and moving image accumulates, a testimony of shared experience begins to emerge, and in turn a collective body of knowledge.

‘May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth’ bears witness to geopolitical upheavals, forced migration and community disintegration whilst simultaneously enacting modes of survival for those marginalised by colonial-capitalist conditions – reclaiming space for alternative political logics to persist. The project’s overarching title, ‘May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth’ is borrowed from the English translation of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s ‘Infrarealist Manifesto’ (1976), used here by Abbas and Abou-Rahme as a reminder to resist forgetfulness and the erasure of personal, political and community histories that disappear all too quickly from consciousness.

Abbas and Abou-Rahme will activate the installation with the live performance ‘an echo buried, buried, but calling still’ (2022). Drawing upon further sound, video, and text from the artist’s larger archive and combining this with live vocals, electronics, sound sampling and projections. This new work examines the significance of voice and embodiment through song as a testimony to the resilience of communities under threat.

This is the most substantial presentation of the work of Abbas and Abou-Rahme in the UK to date. The project has been commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and the DIA Art Foundation, New York City, and presented at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

Basel Abbas (b. Nicosia, Cyprus, 1983) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b. Boston, USA, 1983) have had solo exhibitions at, among others, the Art Institute of Chicago (2021); Kunstverein in Hamburg (2018); Art Jameel Project Space Dubai (2017); Alt Bomontiada, Istanbul (2017); and Carroll / Fletcher, London (2016).

Their work has been included in major international biennials such as the 12th Sharjah Biennial (2015), the 10th Gwangju Biennale, the 31st São Paulo Biennial (both 2014), the 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013), and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). They are currently participating in the 12th Berlin Biennale (2022).

Further Info

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Dia Artist Web Projects Series – ‘Postscript: after everything is extracted’ and ‘Part 1: May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth’

Documents

E-flux Announcement – May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth

Interview: In the studio with… Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Apollo Magazine, September 2022

Interview: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme ‘On The Search For A New Language’, Something Curated, September 2022

Review: Greg Thomas, 'Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth’, Art Monthly, October 2022

Project Details

‘May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth: Only sounds that tremble through us’ (2020–2022) was presented at 5 Florence Street from the 9 September to 9 October 2022. The exhibition was open Thursday – Sunday, 12–6pm and free to enter.

Read the Commentary by Priya Jay –

Listen to Priya Jay read the Commentary here –

Location –

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.

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).

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

Location –

'A Place for the Work and the Human Being’ runs throughout 2019 and takes place in a range of venues, new and old, around Glasgow. The series explores the needs, expectations and possibilities of the space for art today and speakers include artists, architects, curators and others.

The title is borrowed from the sub-title of a text by Swiss artist Rémy Zaugg (1943 – 2005), ‘The Art Museum of My Dreams’, written in 1986, translated into English in 2013 and now out of print.

Conceived to run in parallel with our transition, having drawn our exhibition programme at 21 Woodlands Terrace to a close after 10 years and 30 exhibitions, the series takes place while we develop plans for projects and exhibitions in new locations.