Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abu-Rahme in-conversation with Hazem Jamjoum
Join the artists Ruanne Abu-Rahme & Basel Abbas for an in-conversation hosted by Hazem Jamjoum that gives insight to their practice and new work on display at Nottingham Contemporary in the exhibition Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom.
Access
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This event will be held in The Space.
Speakers will use microphones.
This event is wheelchair accessible.
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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 crisis 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. Often reflecting on ideas of non-linearity in the form of returns, amnesia and deja vu, and in the process unfolding the slippages between actuality and projection (virtuality, myth, wish), what is and what could be. 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.
Hazem Jamjoum is curator of the British Library’s early twentieth century audio recordings of relevance to Arab and Gulf History. His work aims at digitizing, cataloguing and contextualizing this part of Arab communities’ audio heritage. He has also co-lead a project aimed at identifying similar at-risk audiovisual collections in the region with the longer term aim of fostering such preservation and curatorial work on a wider scale. His doctoral research in history at NYU traces the connections between the production of “Arabic music” as a concept and a commodity, and the implications of these production processes on supra-state collective identifications, pan-Arabism in particular.