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Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Until we became fire and fire us
2023
Site-specific audio-visual installation with steel panels, prints on metal and prints on fabric
Dimensions variable
Produced by Sharjah Art Foundation, co- commissioned by Polygreen Culture and Art Initiative (PCAI), Piraeus, Greece
Courtesy of the artists
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou- Rahme’s multidisciplinary practice maps out a contemporary landscape shaped by a sense of perpetual crisis as well as a politics of desire and disaster. Until we became fire and fire us (2023), a site-specific, multi-channel audiovisual and mixed media installation, explores the visual and aural manifestations of the desire to reconnect with severed homelands, communities and histories. Flashes of distant poetry, fractured melodies and intense text and video projections pervade the overgrown ruins of Bait Haider Abadi, a heritage house in Al Mureijah. This sense of discontinuity and misdirection formally embodies the feelings of alienation and loss conjured by histories of displacement and dispossession. The central courtyard of the house functions sporadically as a stage for experimental music performances throughout the Biennial
