In December of 2020, Palestinian artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme launched Half I of their venture Could amnesia by no means kiss us on the mouth by the Dia Artwork Basis’s Artist Internet Tasks collection. Subtitled Postscript: After every little thing is extracted, the exhibition — a part of a wave of on-line exhibits within the first 12 months of the pandemic — compiled discovered footage from border-zone communities in Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, and Syria, together with movies by the artists to compose what Rea McNamara described in a 2021 Hyperallergic article as a “core narrative about moving through grief and loss during COVID-19.”
Grief and loss are nonetheless foremost themes in Half II of the net venture, which launched in 2022, however the perpetrators and casualties have modified. At a time when such narratives have change into more and more mediated and manipulated within the public and digital sphere, the duo’s personal content material has accordingly taken a backseat to almost 170 discovered recordings depicting protests, gatherings, and above all, music — towards a backdrop of personal houses and public areas, folks carry out and sing, primarily in Arabic. English translations of music lyrics and details about the person movies can be found, whereas an index helps guests navigate the location.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, from Postscript: after every little thing is extracted (element from Could amnesia by no means kiss us on the mouth) (2020–ongoing); assortment of the artists, commissioned by Dia Artwork Basis for the Artist Internet Tasks collection (© Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, picture courtesy Dia Artwork Basis, New York)
By layering clips that may be performed concurrently, the net venture loosely echoes in-person exhibitions, which have been offered as immersive multichannel sound and video installations on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork and different venues lately. However the quick access the net venture supplies to details about the movies, together with folks, locations, and descriptions of occasions, is essential context for guests far faraway from the subject material. Importantly, the location breaks the social media cycle of providing up picture and sound bites that erase the identities of these pictured, earlier than the movies themselves are erased: Most of the archived clips are in any other case lengthy gone from the web.
The web exhibition’s title suggests a need to recollect, or maybe much more so, anxiousness on the considered forgetting the person and collective experiences of on a regular basis resistance and resilience. If the venture is actually, because the Dia web site states, about bearing witness to “violence, loss, displacement, and forced migration through performance,” what of this could we keep in mind and the way can these recollections translate into expressions of resistance?
Now greater than ever, as questions and opposition are quelled in america by strategic governmental efforts to expunge phrases, names, and archives, Could amnesia by no means kiss us on the mouth proposes that holding onto these moments is a robust political act. Watching on our computer systems, the venture might not appear to make an instantaneous distinction, however so long as it stays out there, the movies declare place towards displacement, identification towards anonymity, existence towards eradication.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Could amnesia by no means kiss us on the mouth (2020) (© Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, courtesy the artists)
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s Could amnesia by no means kiss us on the mouth continues on-line long run as a part of the Dia Basis’s Artist Internet Venture collection. The exhibition was curated by Kelly Kivland with Dia’s curatorial assistant Theodora Bocanegra Lang. The digital platform was programmed by Lukas Eigler-Harding.
