Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom

Spring 2026 at Kunstinstituut Melly

This spring, Kunstinstituut Melly presents a new season of exhibitions opening across April and May 2026. On 18 April, two solo exhibitions open as part of the ongoing series Call & Response. A group exhibition, Draw Redraw Withdraw, will follow on 23 May.

Call & Response

Call & Response brings artists into proximity whose practices resonate with one another. The series reflects Kunstinstituut Melly’s commitment to supporting artists whose work engages with geopolitical demands while imagining new possibilities. This season presents exhibitions by Hajra Waheed and by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. In both, the artists situate viewers within ongoing conditions that call for sustained attention and attunement, attesting to sound as both a political and liberatory force.

Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom

Opening 18 April 2026

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme create multimedia installations that engage the politics and poetics of anti-colonial resistance while tracing struggles against dispossession and oppression in Palestine. Working together since 2007, their practice combines moving image, sound, and text to explore how histories of resistance are carried across time.

Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom draws on a process of study: learning with and from former Palestinian prisoners, poets, revolutionary thinkers, and the many practices of refusal that continue to shape daily life in Palestine. Through this approach, the installation traces connections across generations, approaching resistance as an ongoing practice of study while acknowledging a broader indebtedness to those who have resisted before us.

In this new commission, Basel and Ruanne ask: what does it mean to resist in impossible conditions, to breathe where one should not breathe, and to emerge from sites of exclusion unbound? Writing, storytelling, and song emerge as life-affirming acts that sustain the capacity to continue resisting, even within conditions designed to confine the body and imagination. Through the sampling and layering of moving image and sound, the pair construct what they describe as “new scripts,” forming a poetics of resistance.

Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom is co-commissioned by Kunstinstituut Melly in collaboration with The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, Brown University; MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; and Nottingham Contemporary.