Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, installation and performance practices. Their work explores issues connected with spatial politics and subjectivity, place and narrative, and spatio-temporal resonances in the relation between the actual, imagined and remembered. Often taking on the form of interdisciplinary installations and live audio-visual performances, their practice increasingly examines the immersive, experiential possibilities of sound, image and environment. They have exhibited and performed internationally and most recently founded the sound and image performance collective “Tashweesh”.

Lecture: “Navigating the Dialectics of Desire and Disaster in the Contemporary Palestinian Landscape”
Monday August 6,2012 at 11:00 to 15:00 – Campus in Camps Al Feneiq Center, Deheishe Refugee Camp by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

The artists will reflect on their practice and discuss their most recent project “The Zone”, which explores the particular dynamics that have brought about the construction of a consumerist regime, a ‘dream-world’, out of the remains of an aborted Palestinian struggle.

Critically ‘reading’ the transformation of the PLO into an ‘authority’ and eventually a ‘security’ regime and with it the birth of new political discourses and desires largely centered on consumption; seemingly ‘beyond’ but always brushing up against the outer limits of occupation, its increasingly dystopian wider environment. “The Zone”, by evoking both the phantasmagoria of the dream-world and the dystopia of the catastrophe, reflects this state of being, full of surrealism, absurdity and a growing sense of the uncanny.