Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice 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 crises and an endless ‘present’, one that is shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. They have been developing a body of work that questions this suspension of the present and searches for ways in which an altogether different imaginary and language can emerge that is not bound within colonial/capitalist narrative and discourse. 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.

Basel and Ruanne have presented solo exhibitions at institutions such as Copenhagen Contemporary (2024), Astrup Fearnley Museet (2023), the Museum of Modern Art (2022), The Common Guild, Glasgow (2022), the Art Institute of Chicago (2021), the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2020), the Kunstverein, Hamburg (2018), and the Art Jameel Project Space, Dubai (2017). Their work has also been featured in major international biennials such as the Whitney Biennial (2026), the Sharjah Biennial (2023, 2015), the Berlin Biennale (2022), the Busan Biennale (2018), the Gwangju Biennale and the São Paulo Biennale (both in 2014), the Istanbul Biennial (2013), the Liverpool Biennial (2010), and the Venice Biennale (2009).