Nottingham Contemporary

We are proud to present a major new commission by the Palestinian artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme who work together across sound, image, text, installation and performance. 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.

Abbas and Abou-Rahme 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. The artists consider a non-linear approach to storytelling, drawing 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’ which investigate the political, visceral and material possibilities of sound, image, text and site.

A newly commissioned video work will present an activation of one such 'new script', exploring songs, poems and daily acts of resistance of prisoners. Firsthand recordings, testimonies and stories of former prisoners build upon the artists’ expansive archive and are layered with poems and prose 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.