Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work across sound, image, text, installation and performance to probe a contemporary landscape marked by seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless present. Their practice questions this suspension of the present, searching for ways to create a different imaginary and language beyond narratives shaped capitalist and colonial structures. To this end, they excavate, activate and invent incidental narratives, figures, gestures and sites as material for re-imagining the possibilities of the present. Their approach samples both existing and self-authored material, recasting them into new ‘scripts’ that unfold the slippages between actuality and projection, between what is and what could be.
Abbas and Abou-Rahme were inaugural fellows at the Akademie der Kunst der Welt, Cologne in 2013. Their work has been shown at MoMA, New York; the Dia Art Foundation, New York; Warsaw Museum of Modern Art; ICA London; ICA Philadelphia; Kunsthalle Wien, the Palestinian Museum, Portikus; Venice Biennale (2009); Liverpool Biennial (2010); Guanzhou Triennial (2012); São Paulo Biennale (2014); Berlin Biennale (2022); and the Sydney Biennale (2026). Abbas and Abou-Rahme are recipients of the Sharjah Biennial Prize (2015) and the Abraaj Prize (2016).
