Nottingham Contemporary is proud to present a major new commission by the Palestinian artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. This exhibition will feature the artists’ largest multi-media installation to date, celebrating their significant contribution to the field of research driven audio-visual art.
Since 2007 Abbas and Abou-Rahme have worked together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. They excavate, activate and invent incidental narratives, figures, gestures and sites as material for re-imagining the possibilities of the present, ultimately questioning what is and what could be. Applying fugitive tactics of presentation, through
collecting, sampling, layering and recasting found and documented materials from both online and offline worlds, the artists consider a non-linear approach to storytelling. They draw on notions of amnesia and déjà vu to create slippages and junctures in our everyday realities and carve out a language that speaks to positions of forced statelessness. By layering and sampling audio-visual materials that are both existing and self-authored, the artists create what they refer to as ‘new scripts’ or ‘poetics of resistance’ investigating the political, visceral and material possibilities of sound, image, text and site.
For their solo exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, a major new work will present an activation of one such script, exploring songs, poems and daily acts of resistance of prisoners,from love songs to songs of resistance, songs dedicated to land and songs to gain freedom. Firsthand recordings, testimonies and stories of former prisoners recorded across the occupied West Bank build upon the artists’ expansive archive and are layered with poems and prose penned by the artists, poets and scholars examining detention and freedom, resilience and the fight for justice within regimes of occupation and oppression. Through song, sound and music alongside writing, the artists ask, ‘how is it that the very form of sound allows it to seep, to transgress, to move in and beyond an enclosed space, whether in the small or the big prison?’ By investigating sound and writing as a tool to dissolve repressive structures and permeate borders, the artists highlight how communities can mobilise hope and collectively imagine alternative futures, so that one day the prison walls may be turned to dust.
Press release from Nottingham Contemporary
Image: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Installation view from Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom at Nottingham Contemporary, 2025. Photography by Rae Dowling
