Until We Became Fire and Fire Us

For nearly two decades, Palestinian artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme have worked across sound, video, text, installation, and performance to confront colonialism and amplify the everyday practices of anticolonial resistance and the intertwined questions of memory and forgetting. Sampling and recombining archival materials through sounds, images, and texts of their own making, they construct new "scripts." Abbas and Abou-Rahme do not understand being in the negative simply as a condition of loss. Rather than reducing what has been shattered into a singular narrative, they approach it as an opening—a space from which to imagine love, resistance, and the collective imaginary of liberation, even under the most extreme conditions. Situated at the intersection of performance and political imagination, embodiment and virtuality, their practice examines the enduring crises produced by colonialism and capitalism, as well as a suspension of the present in which the future remains perpetually deferred. And in so doing, they seek the emergence of another language and another imagination, one capable of exceeding those narratives and discourses.