Wavelength, an online artist lecture series presented by the ICA at VCU, VCUarts, and VCUarts Qatar, returns for the Fall ’22 semester with a virtual talk from multimedia artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b.1983) work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice, largely research based, is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Across their works they probe a contemporary landscape marked by seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless ‘present’, one that is shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. In their projects, they find themselves excavating, activating and inventing incidental narratives, figures, gestures and sites as material for re-imagining the possibilities of the present. Largely their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, objects and recasting them into altogether new ‘scripts’. The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multi-media installations and live sound/image performances.
They were fellows at Akademie der Kunste der Welt in Cologne in 2013 and artists in residence at the Delfina Foundation, London in 2009. They are recipients of the Sharjah Biennale Prize in 2015 and Abraaj Prize in 2016. Their most recent publication ‘And Yet Amy Mask Is Powerful’ is published by Printed Matter in New York. Their current project May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth is being released in three parts with Dia Art Foundation as part of their Artist Web Projects.