Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s Archive of Palestinian Life

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 252, ‘Remapping’

Because nothing comes from nothing, I begin with the insistent, final lines of ‘Enemy of the Sun’ (1970) by the Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim:

I shall not compromise

And to the last pulse in my veins

I shall resist,

Resist – and resist.

A year after they were written, these words appeared in the Black Panther Party’s newsletter, misattributed to the revolutionary George L. Jackson, whose handwritten copy of Al-Qasim’s verse was found in his San Quentin prison cell after he was shot and martyred amid an attempt to escape. The unwitting shuffling of names that marks this poem’s American reception – which let Jackson be known by the words of his comrade Al-Qasim, and Al-Qasim by Jackson – precisely encapsulates the kind of radical, authorial impropriety at the core of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s collectivizing, meta-archival practice. Nothing comes from nothing.

For nearly two decades, Abbas and Abou-Rahme, based between Ramallah and New York, have compiled, sampled from and sutured found images, audio and text to recompose the world into booming threnodies for dispossession. ‘How do the most intimate parts of your being get captured by the system of colonialization?’ they ask. ‘And, how do people resist?’ I met Abbas and Abou-Rahme early this spring at their home and studio in Bushwick, on the eve of their departure to Ramallah, where they are producing a new multi-channel, audiovisual installation due to premiere this autumn at Nottingham Contemporary.

We spoke about the importance of creating a vast counter-archive to document Palestinian life.

Titled Prisoners of Love (2025), the work takes as its starting point the words and songs of Palestinian prisoners, for whom the site of prison itself functions as a cruel metonym for their occupied homeland. ‘One in five Palestinians serves a prison sentence,’ Abbas told me, adding, ‘Sometimes, being in prison is the only time that Palestinian men and women, many of whom are refugees, are allowed to return to the land that, since 1948, has brutally been denied to them.’ We spoke about the stories and symbols of captivity and miraculous escape that inspire the duo’s new work, and about the importance of creating – amid what human-rights experts have repeatedly identified as an ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people – a vast counter-archive to document Palestinian life.

Abbas and Abou-Rahme grew up in Ramallah but met as students in the UK, where both were deeply embedded within the electronic music scene: Abbas has a background in music; Abou-Rahme in film and poetry. Several early works stand as testament to their decidedly non-medium-specific methodology and their shared political interests. Their video Collapse (2009) stitches together black and white footage pulled from newsreels and films such that their sources become indistinguishable: a woman looks at the vista beyond the edge of her balcony; before her, a landscape pixelates into a series of running figures, which then blurs into a dense cloud of dust. Contingency (2010), a four-channel audio installation, amplifies the sounds of people attempting to cross an Israeli checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem: snippets of conversation are severed by the sounds of boots on gravel or a PA system ringing. The piece becomes a lo-fi ‘sonic map’ depicting how, for the surveilling ears of the state, the movements of any Arab in Palestine constitute a violation. ‘It’s not like we were getting permission from the settlers to shoot,’ the artists told me, speaking to the dire conditions that have always informed their aesthetic. ‘Our equipment has to get smaller and smaller these days.’

The scope and sources of Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s work expanded in the early 2010s, when footage of the anti-governmental protests of the Arab Spring was shared by thousands in real time, actualizing one of the central tenets of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s essay ‘Toward a Third Cinema’ (1969), to construct ‘a throbbing, living reality which recaptures truth in any of its expressions’. It was around this time that Abbas and Abou-Rahme started to compile and store the massive archive of user-generated material – largely from Iraq, Palestine, Syria and Yemen – that would appear as part of May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020–ongoing), which was presented in 2022 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the form of a multi-media instal­lation and a series of public performances by several Palestinian electronic musicians and dancers, including Makimakkuk and Haykal. The images that comprise May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth show people across the Arab world singing and dancing, their movements braided into a percussive loop. If you listen, you can hear it: Resist – and resist.

A few days before my visit, I saw Abbas and Abou-Rahme speak, alongside the rest of the Bilna’es collective, to a packed house at New York’s Giorno Poetry Systems, about Being the Negative (2025) – a new publication that pairs a poetic manifesto by the two artists with a suite of pointillist drawings by Abou-Rahme’s late father, Tawfik. ‘Returning / here now / on this corner / in this word / that sentence / this rhythm / this silence / as tremble’, they write. Here too, the language of grief that shatters the present reads like choreography, where the deictic markers – words like ‘here’, ‘now’ or ‘this’ – that might otherwise depress a string of single nouns into strict sequence are redoubled, unmoored by their repetition into a shared kind of movement, or a promise of return. Mourning, for Abbas and Abou-Rahme, is not a poetic act, but a real and resounding one.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 252 with the headline ‘A Promise of Return’

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s ‘Prisoners of Love’ will be on view at Nottingham Contemporary, from 27 September

^{Main image: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Prisoners of Love (working title) (detail), 2025, video still. Courtesy: the artists}