Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom

Multimedia installations

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme create multimedia installations that engage the politics and poetics of anti-colonial resistance while tracing struggles against dispossession and oppression in Palestine. Working together since 2007, their practice combines moving image, sound, and text to explore how histories of resistance are carried across time.

The exhibition

Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom draws on a process of study: learning with and from former Palestinian prisoners, poets, revolutionary thinkers, and the many practices of refusal that continue to shape daily life in Palestine. Through this approach, the installation traces connections across generations, approaching resistance as an ongoing practice of study while acknowledging a broader indebtedness to those who have resisted before us.

Resist in impossible conditions

In this new commission, Basel and Ruanne ask: what does it mean to resist in impossible conditions, to breathe where one should not breathe, and to emerge from sites of exclusion unbound? Writing, storytelling, and song emerge as life-affirming acts that sustain the capacity to continue resisting, even within conditions designed to confine the body and imagination. Through the sampling and layering of moving image and sound, the pair construct what they describe as “new scripts,” forming a poetics of resistance.

Co-commissioned

Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom is co-commissioned by Kunstinstituut Melly in collaboration with The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, Brown University; MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; and Nottingham Contemporary.