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.

Their work often reflects on ideas of non-linearity in the form of returns, amnesia and deja vu, and in the process unfolds the slippages between actuality and projection (virtuality, 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, and 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 multi-media installations and live sound/image performances.