Join us for a panel featuring artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme in conversation with Nicholas Mirzoeff (Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU). Together, the speakers will explore a range of multimedia art practices as sites of political imagination and resistance. Hosted by BFA Photography in collaboration with MA Media Studies.

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.

Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor and Chair of the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Among the founders of the interdisciplinary practice of visual culture, he has published a dozen books and many articles.

His most recent book is To See In The Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7th (Pluto, 2025), which is the subject of a dossier at Social Text journal. In 2023, he published White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (MIT Press) and An Introduction to Visual Culture (Third edition, Routledge). How To See The World was published by Pelican in the UK (2015) and by Basic Books in the US (2016). It has been translated into eleven languages and was a New Scientist Top Ten Book of the Year for 2015. His book, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011), won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2013. A frequent blogger and writer, his work has appeared in The Nation, Hyperallergic, Frieze, The New York Times, The Guardian, Time, and The New Republic.