Basel Abbas & Ruanne
Abou-Rahme

Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, video, image and text practices. In their own words, their projects “express the baffling contradictions and disruptions of the Palestinian experience, past and present, and the relationship between the actual, imagined and remembered”.

Basel Abbas

Basel Abbas was born in Nicosia, Cyprus in 1983 and now lives in Ramallah, Palestine. He received his Diploma in Sound Engineering from the School Of Audio Engineering, Glasgow, Scotland (2003-04) and his BA in Recording Arts from the School of Audio Engineering Institute, Middlesex University, London (2004-05). He frequently collaborates with artist and film-maker Ruanne Abou-Rahme on  installations and live audio-visual performances. He co-founded the audio-visual group Tashweesh and the music collective Ramallah Underground (under the stage name Aswatt - Arabic for “sounds” or “voices”), which has performed all over the world and features on numerous recordings.

Abbas and Abou-Rahme have performed with Tashweesh at The South Bank Centre in London as part of Poetry International; at the Glasgow CCA, Edinburgh College of Arts; and IMAGES Festival Copenhagen (2010).

Other recent exhibitions and performances include "Arabicity" curated by Rose Issa Projects at the Beirut Exhibition Center and the Bluecoat Art Centre, Liverpool (2010); Poetry International, The South Bank Centre, London; the installation "Contingency" for "Future Movements – Jerusalem" at the Liverpool Biennial (2010);  "Collapse" at the Freies Museum Berlin (2010); three installations ("Collapse", "Contingency" and "Horizons") at the Images Festival, Copenhagen; “Contingency”(an 8-minute, 4-channel sound installation in collaboration with Ruanne Abou-Rahme), at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2010); “Collapse” (a 9-minute, single-channel sound and video installation with Ruanne Abou-Rahme) at Cinema Now, Cambridge Film Festival (2009) and the Delfina Foundation, London (2009); “Ramallah Syndrome” (a 13-minute, 6-channel sound installation with Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Sandi Hillal and Alessandro Petti), at the 3rd Jerusalem Show, Al-Ma’mal Foundation, Jerusalem (2009), the Palestinian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009); and “Ramallah Syndrome” (a 40-minute live audio-visual performance with Ruanne Abou-Rahme) at the S.A.L.E., 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) and the 3rd Riwaq Biennale, Bier Zeit, Palestine (2009).

Abbas also composes film scores and sound pieces, including "The Tangible" (a TG Stan production directed by Frank Vercuyssen), which premiered in Bergen, Oslo, Antwerp and Paris; “For Cultural Purposes Only”, for Sarah Wood’s Animate Projects Ltd (2009); “The Stolen Child”, for Nial O’Suilleabhain’s One Eye Film (2009); and “Double Exposure”, for Ruanne Abou-Rahme, which won Best Foreign Film at the Terra Di Tutti Film Festival, Bologna, Italy (2008); “Chronicles of a Refugee” for a 6-part documentary by Adam Shapiro (2008); and “It Is So If You Say So” for Sam Bardaouil & Khaled Majzoub, American University Dubai/DUCTAC Gallery, Dubai (2008).

Ramallah Underground performed extensively internationally, with shows at The Forum, Melbourne Arts Festival, Australia (2009); the Taybeh October Festival, Taybeh, Ramallah, Palestine (2009); Sfinks Festival, Antwerp, Belgium (2009); Liverpool Arabic Arts Festival at The Bluecoat Gallery (2009); a tour of Italy (Rome; Bergamo; Milan; Bologna; Pisa; and Padua, 2008); and the Beursschouwburg Centre, Brussels (2008).