Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Only sounds that tremble through us

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A dark room with purple walls is occupied by video projections and illuminated artworks on the floor and ceiling, creating an effect like overlapping windows on a computer screen. A purple glow comes from a tinted window on the left side. Freestanding panels are scattered throughout the room, each with colorful abstractions and other images mounted to them. Blue banners with abstracted plant designs hang from the ceiling and a red video projection, showing a person lying on their back, glows on the far wall

Exhibition view: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Only sounds that tremble through us, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2024. Photo: Dario Lasagni

Location
Hayden Gallery
Featured Artists
Basel Abbas
Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Explore all artists who have exhibited at the List in our Artist Index.

Artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme undertake long-term research projects that center themes of collectivity, resilience, and memory. 

Their moving image works, which often sample found video alongside their own footage, poetry, and pulsating soundscapes, are complicated by a concern with gaps and glitches, products of the artists’ reflexive approach to translating fugitive fragments of sound and image. The masks and digital avatars found in their works raise questions of visibility and opacity, and the artists’ use of unnatural and inverted colors implies the limits of the visible light spectrum.

Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s exhibition features three bodies of work from the pair’s decade-long project May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2010–ongoing). A recent commission that debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in 2022, Only sounds that tremble through us (2020–22) is a three-channel video installation that expands from the artists’ digital video archive of everyday communal song and dance from diverse communities in the Arab world which they collected from social media. At Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s invitation, one dancer and three electronic musicians use their bodies as samplers and take up varied improvisations in response to the movements, lyrics, or sentiments they observed in these quotidian recordings. Surfacing these ephemeral gestures through reinterpretation, Abbas and Abou-Rahme ask what it means to archive sound and gesture through embodiment and look to song and dance as modes of resilience and repositories of memory.

Basel Abbas (b. Nicosia, Cyprus, 1983) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b. Boston, USA, 1983) have collaborated since 2007. They have had institutional solo exhibitions at, among others, Astrup Fearnley Museet (2023); the Museum of Modern Art (2022); Common Guild, Glasgow (2022); the Art Institute of Chicago (2021); Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2020); Kunstverein in Hamburg (2018); Art Jameel Project Space Dubai (2017); and the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2015). Their work has been included in major international biennials such as the Sharjah Biennial (2023, 2015); the Berlin Biennale (2022); the Busan Biennial (2018); the Gwangju Biennale and the São Paulo Biennial (both 2014), the Istanbul Biennial (2013), the Liverpool Biennial (2010); and the Venice Biennale (2009).

Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s exhibition is organized by Natalie Bell, Curator.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Only sounds that tremble through us will tour to the Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College (January 9th–March 10th, 2025).

Sponsors

General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Vice Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. In-kind media sponsorship provided by 90.9 WBUR. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.

Images

In a dark room, saturated purple footage of plants is projected onto a corner. In front, freestanding metal panels have smaller rectangles of images and text mounted on them. A purple tinted window glows in the background on the right. Banners containing saturated, inverted images of figures and plants hang from the ceiling.
A dark room with purple walls is occupied by video projections and illuminated artworks on the floor and ceiling, creating an effect like overlapping windows on a computer screen. A purple glow comes from a tinted window on the left side. Freestanding panels are scattered throughout the room, each with colorful abstractions and other images mounted to them. Blue banners with abstracted plant designs hang from the ceiling and a red video projection, showing a person lying on their back, glows on the far wall
A purple wall extends across the image. On the left, two freestanding panels are collaged with images and text, including digitally rendered faces and saturated images of plants. On the right, introductory exhibition text is illuminated on the wall.
Projected footage of branches and leaves against a sky fills the corner of a room. In the light of the projection, four dried thistle plants are stuck in concrete bricks sitting on the floor. To the left and right of the projected footage, two free standing panels are spotlit, highlighting imagery mounted to them. Another thistle plant peaks out from behind the right panel.
Freestanding metal panels are scattered across a dark gallery, with drawings and saturated abstract images mounted to them. A tinted window on the left emits a bright purple glow. Small banners hanging from the ceiling contain abstracted silhouettes of plants. Three video projections are visible in the background; the central one shows a close view of a thorny green plant.
Freestanding metal panels are scattered across a dark gallery, with drawings and saturated abstract images mounted to them. Interspersed with the panels are dried thistle plants stuck into concrete bricks. Video projections onto uneven panels are visible in the background.
Videos are projected onto uneven surfaces of large panels against three walls. The central projection shows glowing, almost psychedelic inverted footage of a group of figures in a line. The right projection shows a woman (also in unnatural, inverted tones) dancing, and the left projection shows a person wearing a yellow shirt. All three images are overlaid with text in English and Arabic reading, “Unbound.”
A deep blue video depicting a person looking out from a mountain onto a body of water is projected onto an uneven surface of overlapping rectangular panels. Overlaid on the video footage, English and Arabic text reads “As though this melody has always been here”.
A dark room with purple walls displaying various rectangular panels scattered across the room. Each panel is spotlit showcasing a thistle plant with imagery affixed to the panels. Purple light peers through the right of the frame. Banners with abstract silhouettes of plants hang from the ceiling. In the back corner of the room, saturated purple video footage of plant forms is projected onto the walls.
In the foreground on the right, a saturated red video is projected onto an uneven surface of overlapping rectangular panels. The video depicts a person in movement with text overlaid that reads “the land brings us back to life.” The left side of the image shows more distant artworks scattered throughout the room: freestanding panels with images mounted on them, dried thistle plants, hanging banners. Footage of orange and yellow flowers is projected onto the back corner.
In the foreground to the left, a freestanding metal panel with a rusty brown surface has a small square of text mounted on it. In front of the panel, dried thistle plants sprout from the top of a stack of concrete bricks. More panels, thistle, and a purple video projection are visible in the background.
Vertical metal panel is spotlit and bolted to the floor. Affixed to the panel, a large abstract blue photo is overlaid with a smaller abstracted image, perhaps a landscape. Overlapping the lower edge of the blue image, a small drawing depicting a woman with marks across her torso and a black cactus behind her is affixed to the panel. In front of the panel, a stack of bricks with a thistle growing out of them is displayed. On the purple wall in the background, text in the upper right corner peeks into frame
In the foreground, a rectangular metal panel has images affixed to its surface, including a photograph of a figure moving their arm in inverted tones. A small stack of bricks with a thistle growing out of it sits in front of the panel. Footage of yellow flowers is projected onto the back right corner of the room. In the top left corner, a blue banner hangs from the ceiling.

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