Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Echoes of Resistance

Sounds That Tremble through Us
While we catch glimpses of the archival videos in the Kravis Studio, the majority of the footage on view depicts performances conceived of and filmed by Abbas and Abou-Rahme themselves. Working in Ramallah with electronic musicians Haykal, Julmud, and Makimakkuk, and the dancer Rima Baransi, the artists created new performances that draw on melodies, gestures, and emotions featured in the found footage. By embodying these moments once again, the performers become a living archive of feeling, history, and trauma. As the artists put it, “the body becomes a sampler.”² Abbas and Abou-Rahme use the body to fragment, reproduce, and repeat. The title May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth comes from a translation of writer Roberto Bolaño’s “Infrarealist Manifesto,” written in Mexico City in 1976. It is an urgent call to remain attentive to history in the face of cultural erasure. Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s response to this call is to reinscribe the past onto the body of the present.

Based between New York and Ramallah, Abbas and Abou-Rahme are part of a diaspora haunted by the inability to conclusively return to a homeland. Palestinian intellectual Edward Said has written of exile, “[S]eeing ‘the entire world as a foreign land’ makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal.”³ In the language of music theory, counterpoint is a compositional technique in which two or more melodic lines or “voices” complement one another but act independently. If this is a metaphor for the experience of being deeply familiar with two cultures, what is the metaphor for the experience of the gap between them?

An Echo Buried, Buried, but Calling Still
Sound resists containment; it has the ability to permeate walls and borders and travel across vast distances. Sound is contradictory; it is physical but not material. Abbas and Abou-Rahme participate in a legacy of artists invested in audio for its ability to circumvent power. Just as sound can summon a collective voice, it also evades capture: it can be recorded and replicated, but not confined. It expands beyond an allotted space, whether in a museum gallery or out in the world. Sound is unruly. Sound is promiscuous. Sound misbehaves.

The political implications of sound’s behavior resonate with the ethos of May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth. Songs of exile and lament echo through bodies and speakers across time and place. Museumgoers at MoMA are immersed in deep tones, feeling the effects of the thudding bass. Voices extend beyond their immediate location, echoing out.

Sun Ra tells us, “Listen / but do not listen with your ears alone / you must feel with your intuition sense.”⁶ The prefix infra, as in the “Infrarealist Manifesto” referenced in the work’s title, means “below.” Infrared radiation, for example, oscillates at a lower frequency than red light. This technology detects thermal energy and heat and converts it into an electronic signal that produces an image, allowing for the surveillance or capture of a scene beyond what is visible to the naked eye. The resonance of sound or images from below is invoked in the title of Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s new performance at MoMA: an echo buried, buried, but calling still.