The Museum of Modern Art will present Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth, at The Museum of Modern Art from April 23h through June 26th. This multichannel sounds and video installation in the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio will also feature evening performances by the artists and invited musicians.

Over the past decade, artists Basel Abbas (Palestinian, b. 1983) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (Palestinian American, b. 1983) have collected, sampled, and created audiovisual materials, recasting them into new multimedia works. Taking the contemporary moment in Palestine as a point of departure, their research-based practice imagines new artistic and political possibilities through sound, image, and text. For the presentation in the Kravis Studio, Abbas and Abou-Rahme have created an immersive, multichannel sound and moving-image work within a custom installation environment. Drawing on videos from the artists’ archive as well as the performances they created, this work addresses communities deemed “illegal”—their land, histories, and built structures. A new eight-channel sound composition features processed vocals, electronic beats, and audio samples from the archive and performances. A fragmented text written by the artists, proposing that simply breathing becomes a form of resistance, weaves throughout the video.

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