Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s MIT Show Collages Palestinian Life

In April 2019, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme were in the West Bank filming their latest installation. For the work, the artist duo, who are both of Palestinian descent, spent three years filming the dancer Rima Baransi and electronic musicians Makmakkuk, Haykal, and Julmud performing—and remixing—traditional Palestinian or Arab songs and dances while standing primarily on land under threat of annexation by Israeli settlers. The performers were encouraged to select their own bits of Palestinian culture to “sample” into fragmentary movements or melodies. But when two of the performers opted to use the same mourning song, something inexplicable happened. As one performer began to sing, several birds alighted nearby and echoed the melody. When Abbas and Abou-Rahme returned later to film the second performer, the same birds returned and again sang the melody before flying off. The experience was clarifying.

“We think that we’re the only ones that are keeping these memories. But the land and different non-human beings in this land can also have the memory,” Abou-Rahme told ARTnews in a recent interview. “We’re not incredibly spiritual people, but these things that happened during the filming left a big impact on us.”

Memory, history, culture and the land lie at the center of that installation, titled Only sounds that tremble through us, and the artists’ new exhibition—of the same name—at the MIT List Visual Arts Center represents a major evolution in Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s work.

For nearly 15 years, the duo has dedicated its artistic practice to creating an archive. In 2010, the artists were in Palestine, watching the so-called “Arab Spring” uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere, like everyone else, through the pinhole lens of social media. As videos and images of protesting, dancing, and singing passed through the slipstream of Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms, Abbas and About-Rahme became determined to counteract the “amnesia” of the online space. That impulse evolved into “May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth,” an ongoing project that has taken many forms: installations, an interactive web project, public performances, and sculptures, among others. Many of those works are on view at MIT, but it is undoubtedly the title work that will linger in audiences’ psyches long after they leave. 

Only sounds consists of a 34-minute, three-channel video projected onto walls fronted by steel and concrete panels. Like many of Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s works, the video collages fragments of text, poetry, and video clips appropriated from a variety of sources. However, in this installation, those elements are interwoven with original footage of the performances by Baransi, Makmakkuk, Haykal, and Julmud, as well as a two-channel sound composition of percussive electronic music that pervades the space.

The three channels respond to each other and sometimes compete for attention, and often change tone in a split-second, jumping from a peaceful performance of a song in an unidentified valley to archival footage of what appears to be an Israeli bulldozer destroying a Palestinian structure. The steel and concrete panels bear a striking resemblance to the West Bank Wall (termed the “Apartheid Wall” by many Palestinians). Here, they serve as both a screen and an obstruction, fracturing the videos projected onto them. The impression is one of “disjuncture” and “disjointment,” which Abou-Rahme said the two artists believe are central to Palestinians’ lived experience.

“It was very important for us to formally translate the disjuncture and disjointment to create a work that wasn’t too smooth,” Abou-Rahme said. “We were afraid of creating a work that was too smooth and too easily digestible or fetishized, because in a way, what we’re talking about is that fragmentation and that destruction—how within the fragmentation, people are creating different possibilities of life.” 

Fragments are a recurring motif in the exhibition beyond the “sampled” gestures, movements, and melodies of Only sounds. Adjacent to the installation lies Where the soil has been disturbed, a 2022 work that consists of a field of free-standing steel panels fronted by concrete bricks from which petrified Syrian thistles grow. (The artists position the plants as symbols of resistance, since they often grow in areas of disturbance and have appeared after Palestinian villages have been bulldozed.) The steel panels serve as canvases for the artists’ fragments, from drawings to screen-grabbed snippets of TextEdit poetry and inverted stills of dancers and protestors. The overlapping fragments call to mind a cluttered computer desktop—a motif in an earlier iteration of “May amnesia”—and allow the artists to connect seemingly disparate fields of Palestinian life. 

There’s an image in this piece that looks like a topographical map of a river valley, which is paired with a drawing of a woman next to a thistle. This woman’s circulatory system visually mimics the riverbed from the map, while another nearby drawing shows a mouth whose tongue becomes a river. In others, computer-generated avatars of Palestinians are paired with negative macro-pictures of thistles. The pieces seem to assert an inseparable link between Palestinians and the land. 

“The land in all its multiplicity is a character and a being in the work,” Abou-Rahme said. “A lot of what we thought about was, what are the inscriptions that are already in the land? And what are the things that the land remembers that we have forgotten? … And what is it that we, in our consciousness, have forgotten, but our body actually remembers?”

The installation also establishes a deep connection between past and present. Abou-Rahme said that she and Abbas were captivated by how songs and protest chants were modified as they moved from Syria to Palestine to Egypt during the Arab uprisings. Watching videos on social media, they observed, in real time, how the revisions formed a digitized call-and-response, echoing a longstanding tradition in oral poetry, song, and dance of the Arab world.

“We were thinking a lot about what it means to take a gesture or a phrase or part of a song from something that was performed in Iraq—that is, speaking about a specific set of conditions—and then seeing how that specific set of conditions of colonial violence and erasure is then echoed in Palestine,” Abou-Rahme said. 

While early versions of May amnesia meticulously archived social media posts of cultural practices, with Only sounds, the artists aimed to create new performances rather than merely reproducing elements of their archives. According to Abou-Rahme, the call-and-response format became literalized in the making of the piece. Instead of asking their performers to simply reproduce Palestinian or Arab songs and dance, Abou-Rahme and Abbas encouraged them to “fragment” and “mutate” them in singular gestures, refrains, or rhythms. Before they edited the footage, Abou-Rahme and Abbas wrote the poetry and text that appears in the final video, and then produced the sound composition in relation to this “script.” In the final stage, they edited the footage, text, and archival clips together alongside the sound composition.

“There are multiple calls and responses and echoes in the work,” she explained. “There’s the archive, there’s the new performances, and then there’s us in the studio responding to all that and creating this sound composition. Sometimes we’re also singing with them. So, we re-perform and sing.”

Portions of this work are immediately legible to any reasonably informed viewer, but other parts will be accessible only to Arabic speakers or Palestinians. While much of the text and song is translated, entire stanzas are left in Arabic, and certain oblique references are not explained. And the translation of songs and chants is not one-to-one. The artists wanted the piece to speak to anyone, but it was important to them that certain messages remained coded, due to what Abou-Rahme called the “suffocating” representations of Palestine that are pervasive in the Western media.

“It’s so easy, when you come from somewhere like Palestine, to make work for an English-speaking audience and to let that be your trajectory,” she explained. “For us, we always wanted to make work primarily that other Palestinians were going to get something from. Of course, it can speak to more and more and more people and of course, we don’t see Palestine as a singular or a unique issue. We see it as part of a very long history and present of colonial bullshit that’s been killing the planet.”

The exhibition has one other call-and-response embedded in it. Originally scheduled to open last fall, it was postponed following the October 7 Hamas attack. Nine months of Israeli military operations in Gaza later, the context around the works has shifted. Many locations filmed in Only sounds are no longer accessible to Palestinians due to security restrictions or the threat of settler violence, and a whole new set of songs, chants, and dances have entered the online space as activists and protestors connect US policies to its effects internationally.

“The work becomes a call to think more deeply about the intersections between communities that are dispossessed and how the connection can become a powerful force. That’s what we see with the mobilization around Palestine right now,” Abou-Rahme said. “We understand the intersections. We understand that what happens here is connected to what happens in New York.”

“Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Only sounds that tremble through us” is on view at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Boston through July 28, 2024.