Please join us for a seminar with visual artists and filmmakers Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, who will share excerpts from their ongoing long-term research projects, audiovisual installations that explore themes of memory, displacement, dispossession, and resilience.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across sound, image, text, installation and performance. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body, and virtuality. 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. 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.
 

Recent exhibitions include Copenhagen Contemporary and the Glyptotek, Copenhagen (2024); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts (2024); Reina Sofia, Madrid (2024); Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2023); MoMA (2022); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich (2022); The Common Guild, Glasgow (2022); Art Institute of Chicago (2021). Major group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial 2026 and the Sharjah Biennial 15.
 

GIDEST seminars are devoted to discussion of pre-circulated materials. The materials for this event can be found here on the GIDEST site for attendees to read in advance.

This event is part of the bi-weekly GIDEST Seminars presented by the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought.