The Bell / Brown Arts Institute premieres the newest project from internationally-renowned sound, video, and installation artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Featuring interviews with former political prisoners made on location in Palestine, Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom celebrates poetry, music, and art as forms of expressing individual and collective survivance within systems of incarceration across time and space. 

Using strategies of opacity and fragmentation, Abbas and Abou-Rahme incorporate concrete, fabric, and weathered steel—carceral architecture—as the projection surfaces of this sound and video installation to build, in the artists’ words, “a vast counter-archive to document Palestinian life.” “Enemy of the Sun” (1970), by acclaimed Palestinian poet Samih Al-Qasim, foregrounds the installation; this poem was mis-attributed to Black Panther George Jackson and memorialized in the Black Panther newspaper following his 1971 murder in San Quentin prison. Found handwritten in Jackson’s cell, the poem evokes the long relationship between Black political prisoners in the United States and Palestinian political prisoners. 

Prisoners of Love is commissioned by The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, Brown University in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, United Kingdom); Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, The Netherlands); and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona / MACBA (Barcelona, Spain). Kate Kraczon and Thea Quiray Tagle are the co-curators of this project at The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, an extension of the artists’ ongoing relationship with Kraczon, who produced their first US exhibition and catalog in 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 

Moments of exchange between Abou-Rahme and Abbas with Brown’s community have been underway since 2020, with Kraczon connecting them to Nadje Al-Ali, Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), where they were the opening speakers in a series of talks, events, and exhibitions in 2022 jointly organized by CMES and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University on the topics of art, gender and body politics in the Middle East and its diasporas. Abou-Rahme and Abbas have been working with curators at Brown’s John Hay Library since 2023, conducting research in the university’s archival project “Voices of Mass Incarceration in the United States” among other international archival sources. In Spring 2025, Quiray Tagle and the artists developed and taught a graduate and undergraduate research-based course, co-taught with Kraczon, that furthered the artists’ research towards The Bell presentation while enabling students’ own research into family archives, community-based archives, and other untold histories of mass incarceration.

Basel Abbas (b. Nicosia, Cyprus, 1983; New York and Ramallah) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b. Boston, USA, 1983; New York and Ramallah) 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. 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 multimedia installations and live sound/image performances.

Recent solo exhibitions include The song is the call and the land is calling, Copenhagen Contemporary and the Glyptotek, Copenhagen (2024); Only sounds that tremble through us, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts (2024) and Perlman Teaching Museum, Carleton College, Minnesota (2025); At those terrifying frontiers, Reina Sofia, Madrid (2024); An echo buried deep deep down but calling still, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2023); May Amnesia Never Kiss Us on the Mouth, Museum of Modern Art MoMA, New York, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, and The Common Guild, Glasgow (all 2022); and If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust, Art Institute of Chicago (2021) and Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2022), among many others. Major group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial 2026;  Sharjah Biennial 15, Thinking Historically in the Present (2023); Busan Biennale, Divided We stand (2018); Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2016; The Incidental Insurgents, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2015); Sharjah Biennial 12, The past, the present, the possible (2015) [Recipients of the Sharjah Biennial Prize]; 10th Gwangju Biennale, Burning Down the House (2014); 31st São Paulo Biennial, How to talk about things that don’t exist (2014); and the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Mom, am I barbarian? (2013).

Prisoners of Love is commissioned by The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, Brown University in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, United Kingdom); Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, The Netherlands); and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona / MACBA (Barcelona, Spain). 

The project is made possible at Brown by the generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

The exhibition team at the Brown Arts Institute includes Ian Budish, Exhibitions Installation Manager; Kate Hao, Curatorial Coordinator; Kate Kraczon, Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator; Preparators Naushon Hale and Eddie Villanueva; and Nicole Wholean, University Curator and Registrar.