Following their exhibition, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth, at the Dia Art Foundation and the MoMA (opening: April 23, 2022), RISD is hosting artists Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas for a public talk on April 28, 2022. May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth, an ongoing, multipart project, co-commissioned by the MoMA and the Dia Art Foundation, considers how performance—whether in the form of song, spoken word, dance, or gesture—figures as a political act that enables communities to bear witness to experiences of violence, loss, displacement, and forced migration.

The talk is part of a series of events related to the Turner Grant funded course “Power, Pastness and the Performances of Monumentality” focused on the intersections of performance and the politics of memory and forgetting, archives and monuments. This event is also presented as part of the graduate seminar “Theories of the Image.”

The talk is followed by a Q&A session and is free and open to the public.

Learn more about Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s online work at the Dia Art Foundation, their exhibition at the MoMA (opening: April 23, 2022), and their previous works here

After Everything is Extracted is made possible by the Turner Theatrical and Performance Design Grant in conjunction with the Division of Liberal Arts’ MA Program in Global Arts and Cultures (GAC), “Theories of the Image” graduate seminar, and “Power, Pastness and Performances of Monumentality: An Immersive Seminar-Studio.”

This event is organized by Avishek Ganguly (Literary Arts and Studies, Global Arts and Cultures), Christopher Roberts (Theory and History of Art and Design, Experimental and Foundation Studies), and Foad Torshizi (Theory and History of Art and Design, Global Arts and Cultures).

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 (fiction, myth, wish), what is and what could be.

Abbas and Abou-Rahme have exhibited their work in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Art Jameel Project Space, Dubai, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the Akademie Der Künste Der Welt, Cologne, and Delfina Foundation, London among others.