Palestinian
Christian families visit the Nativity grotto, believed to be the birthplace of
Jesus, seeking blessings for their children [Qassam Muaddi / TNA]
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Oh shining star testify, 2019
Installation view at Art Institute of Chicago, 2021
If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust
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If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust—the
first exhibition by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne
Abou-Rahme in a major US museum—combines a site-specific installation of
the artists’ ongoing multimedia projects with a commissioned work
created specifically for the Art Institute of Chicago.
Working in film, installation, performance, sound, and text,
Abbas and Abou-Rahme sample self-authored and existing media and
materials to reframe and activate narratives that they describe as
everyday erasures of Palestinian experience as a means of resisting the
illusion of one immutable history. The interconnected works in this
installation critically examine how bodies, images, language, memories,
and narratives exist within contemporary archives, media, and
institutions. Often reflecting on ideas of amnesia, erasure, and return
within the Palestinian condition, the artists see these artworks as
potential tools for the politically oppressed to become unbound from
colonial systems.
Central to the exhibition is an immersive multimedia installation combining new versions of two multi-channel video works. Oh shining star testify(2019–21)
focuses on CCTV footage taken from a surveillance camera that
circulated online after Yusuf Shawamreh, a 14-year-old Palestinian boy,
was killed by Israeli forces. The layered footage, sampled from
recordings of the event, brings attention to how images that circulate
online can offer a testament to historic events, though that testament
can be obliterated when the internet becomes oversaturated with imagery.
Foregrounding the simultaneous accumulation and disappearance of data
and images, the artists make visible how those “uncounted bodies counter
their own erasures, appearing on a street, on a link or on a feed.”
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other, 2019
Installation view at Art Institute of Chicago, 2021
The second video, At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other (2019–21),uses fragments of Palestinian postcolonial scholar Edward Said’s poem “After the Last Sky”to
interrogate what it means to be constructed as an “illegal” person,
body, or entity. The text fragments are interspersed with human avatars
created from images of demonstrators in the Great March of Return, a
series of protests that began in 2018 and advocated for ending a 12-year
blockade and returning Palestinians to their ancestral homeland. The
avatars, which are rendered with software that represents missing data
as glitches, scars, and incomplete facial features, seem to exist
between the past and the future.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Once an artist, now just a tool, 2021
The exhibitionalso presents for the first time the series of prints Don’t read poetics in these lines
(2010–21). Abbas and Abou-Rahme began producing this work in 2010 by
screenshotting and archiving tweets that responded and continue to
respond to the Arab revolutions. The selectively erased texts distill
the rapid-fire reactions that unfolded on social media, thus standing as
a testament to our time and offering a physical counterweight to the
internet, which the artists consider an “amnesiac archive.”
Extracted from this archive,Once an artist, now just a tool (2021)wascommissioned
by the Art Institute and critiques how museums perpetuate the legacies
of the colonial apparatus. In repositioning these sampled fragments, the
artists assert language’s capacity to challenge systems and histories
of power, critically pointing to the shifts that occur between events
and discourse.
The exhibition’s visceral and material narratives
raise timely and urgent questions about the ways history is constructed
and continually obliterated—encouraging viewers to imagine the potential
futures that emerge from the immersive sonic and visual environment.
If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust is curated by Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Associate Curator, Architecture and Design.
