The Museum of Modern Art presents Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme's May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020–ongoing) in the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, April 23 through June 26, 2022. Over the past decade, artists Basel Abbas (Palestinian, b. 1983) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (Palestinian American, b. 1983) have collected, sampled, and created audiovisual materials, recasting them into new multimedia works.
OVER THE PAST DECADE, the Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme have rifled through the fractured histories of Palestine and the larger Arab world, working across sound, video installation, publishing, performance, and, most recently, Web-based projects in a practice that engages dialectically with historical and present experiences of dispossession and resistance. Mobilizing their archival impulse to forge connections across time and space to activate imaginations held captive by colonialism, the artists fix their attention on quotidian forms of rebellion in the face of perpetual
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.
It’s not customary that an artistic project begins with a postscript, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it turned the world upside down.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s newest work, an ongoing multimedia project co-commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art, was not exempt from this topsy-turviness. In fact, it was especially susceptible to it.
“We began writing in February about the constant mourning, loss, and grief in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and that general area, even though our work always tries to resonate in a broader way,” Abou-Rahme said in a phone interview. “When the pandemic happened and there was this immense global scale of loss and mourning, obviously the text started to take on a completely different significance.”