PRESENTATION: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou Rahme-May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth
Working in the space between the virtual and the physical, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme have developed a collaborative practice that is poetic and haunting. The artists employ complex strategies for layering sound, image, and text in an effort to shed light on the experience of the dispossessed. Exposing the ongoing ramifications of colonialism, Abbas and Abou-Rahme explore the ways in which violence travels across bodies, land, and time.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Common Guild Archive
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s multipart project “May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth” (2020–ongoing) examines how communities bear witness to experiences of violence, loss, displacement, and forced migration. The project’s overarching title 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. Since the early 2010s, Abbas and Abou-Rahme have collected online recordings of everyday people singing and dancing in communal spaces in Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen. The work brings digital traces of these performing bodies together with new performances created by the artists with dancer Rima Baransi and electronic musicians Haykal, Julmud, and Makimakkuk, working in Ramallah, Palestine. According to Abbas and Abou-Rahme, through song and dance, “these fractured communities are resisting their own erasure and laying claim to space, self, and collectivity once more”. 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 thread.
The project has and will continue to evolve into multiple digital and physical forms. Part I, subtitled “Postscript: After everything is extracted”, launched December 10, 2020, as part of Dia’s Artist Web Projects and is accessible for free on Dia’s website. On March 5, 2022, the digital platform expanded with the launch of Part II. A related presentation of the project took place as an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, from 23/4-26/6/2022. Part II of “May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth” includes nearly 170 videos from the artists’ extensive collection of found and unedited online recordings of performances, many of which are no longer accessible online. Among these are poetic expressions of the everyday: a lament for a lost home performed from the rubble of a building in Syria; a lovers’ duet; and a young man in Raqqa, Syria, singing waist-deep in the Euphrates River. The songs from the found videos have also been transcribed into Arabic and translated into English, and both texts are a layered component of Part II. Over the last several years, the artists have also collaborated with electronic musicians Haykal, Julmud, and Makimakkuk, as well as the dancer Rima Baransi, all of whom are based in Palestine. Alongside the found recordings and texts, Part II also features videos shot of the performers responding to specific gestures, music, or texts from the archive. To encourage a singular experience, visitors to Part II can navigate their own trajectory through the compilation of intersecting and overlapping visual material, which is accompanied by sound from the performances and archival videos.
Photo: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (Video still), 2020–ongoing. Courtesy of the artists
Info: The Common Guild, 5 Florence Street, Glasgow, United Kingdom, Duration: 9/9-9/10/2022, Days & Hours: Thu-Sun 12:00-18:00, https://thecommonguild.org.uk/
