The Bell Gallery at Brown University (The Bell) presents Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom, a new exhibition by internationally renowned sound, video, and installation artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, co-curated by Kate Kraczon, Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator of the Brown Arts Institute (BAI) / The Bell and Thea Quiray Tagle, Ph.D., Associate Curator at The Bell / BAI. Featuring interviews with former political prisoners made on location in Palestine, Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom celebrates poetry, music, and art as forms of expressing individual and collective survivance within systems of incarceration across time and space. The exhibition was commissioned by Kraczon in 2020 (Quiray Tagle joined the project in 2023) before debuting at Nottingham Contemporary in 2025. The iteration at the Bell marks the exhibition’s only showcase in the United States and is on view at the Bell February 19 – May 31, 2026.
Using strategies of opacity and fragmentation, Abbas and Abou-Rahme incorporate concrete, fabric, and weathered steel—carceral architecture—as the projection surfaces of this sound and video installation to build, in the artists’ words, “a vast counter-archive to document Palestinian life.” Enemy of the Sun (1970), by acclaimed Palestinian poet Samih Al-Qasim, foregrounds the installation; this poem was mis-attributed to Black Panther George Jackson and memorialized in the Black Panther newspaper following his 1971 murder in San Quentin prison. Found handwritten in Jackson’s cell, the poem evokes the long relationship between Black political prisoners in the United States and Palestinian political prisoners.
Prisoners of Love is commissioned by The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, Brown University in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, United Kingdom); Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, The Netherlands); and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona / MACBA (Barcelona, Spain). Kate Kraczon and Thea Quiray Tagle are the co-curators of this project at The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, an extension of the artists’ ongoing relationship with Kraczon, who produced their first US exhibition and catalog in 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Moments of exchange between Abou-Rahme and Abbas with Brown’s community have been underway since 2020, with Kraczon connecting them to Nadje Al-Ali, Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), where they were the opening speakers in a series of talks, events, and exhibitions in 2022 jointly organized by CMES and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University on the topics of art, gender and body politics in the Middle East and its diasporas. Abou-Rahme and Abbas have been working with curators at Brown’s John Hay Library since 2023, conducting research in the university’s archival project Voices of Mass Incarceration in the United States among other international archival sources. In Spring 2025, Quiray Tagle and the artists developed and taught a graduate and undergraduate research-based course, co-taught with Kraczon, that furthered the artists’ research towards The Bell presentation while enabling students’ own research into family archives, community-based archives, and other untold histories of mass incarceration.
Press release from The Bell Gallery at Brown University
Image: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Still image from Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom. 2025. Image courtesy of the artists
