Metrograph

A selection of four, single-channel audiovisual works by artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Starting with The Incidental Insurgents: The Part About the Bandits (2012-2015), which marks the first part in a multi-layered narrative, unfolding the “story” of a contemporary search for a new political language and imaginary. Drawing on the early anarchist life of Victor Serge and his contemporary anarchist-bandits in 1910s Paris; Abu-Jildeh and Arameet and their bandit gang of farmers who rose up against the British in 1930s Palestine, along with the artist as the quintessential bandit in Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives, and the artists themselves.

The Incidental Insurgents: Unforgiving Years (2012-2015), the second part of the story, traces the metamorphosis of these incidental figures (Serge, Bolaño, the artist themselves) or the resonance of their final gestures years after they have been killed (Bonnot Gang, Abu Jilda), following the figures or their echo to strange places and obscure positions. Arriving at a vanguard political publishing house in 1970’s Jerusalem.

And yet my mask is powerful (2016), confronts the apocalyptic imaginary and violence that dominates our contemporary moment, an apocalyptic vision that seems to clog up even the pores in our bodies. Taking Adrienne Rich’s poem Diving into the Wreck as the beginnings of a script, this work asks what happens to people/place/things/materials when a living fabric is destroyed.

Rounding out the program, fragments from Edward Said’s most personal and poetic work After the Last Sky are repurposed in At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade into Each Other (2019), to create a new script that reflects on what it means now to be constructed as an ‘illegal’ person, body or entity.

Post-screening conversation with Jason Evans and filmmakers Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme on Saturday, June 28th