Exhibition review: Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom

Basel Abbas’ and Ruanne Abou-Rahme's largest-scale exhibition yet is not an easy work to grapple with but demands that the visitor does just that. The exhibition brings together pain and potentiality in a multimedia installation which feels more like a world in itself.

Specially commissioned for the Nottingham Contemporary, Prisoners of Love is an exemplar of techniques that Abbas and Abou-Rahme have developed over the last twenty years: a practice in which existing and self-authored testimonies, poems and prose, sound compositions and images weave into a profoundly immersive experience.

Inside the dark rooms, you must pick your way through a tattered land. Sheets of metal stand erect from the floor like rubble. Overhead, printed sheets of fabric reverberate slightly in the booming noise, like torn curtains. Images and artworks are elusive in the dim light, as though figments of imagination, memories or hopes. So too are the fragmentary testimonials and poems on backs of artworks. Though their words are hardly discernible, they recount the horrors of recent genocide and experiences of dispossession. That some of these are from the artists’ own relatives reinforces their emotional power and realism. 

The darkness, flickering visuals, and ear-splitting audio makes it hard to fully comprehend the work. It’s frayed with what the exhibition catalogue describes as ‘slippages and junctures’ and ‘notions of amnesia and déjà-vu'. 

The space imposes upon the visitor an unease and uncertainty speaking to physical and psychological disintegration under actual confinement. For Palestinians, the exhibition powerfully implies, fragmentation is experienced as a splitting of body from homeland, but also mind from body, and mind from mind.

But Prisoners of Love is as much about resistance as it is about occupation. For Abbas and Abou-Rahme, the two are inextricably linked.

The artists use what they call ‘fugitive’ presentational devices – projections spilling out of screens, and a sound composition oscillating between noise and melody – to explore how confinement also produces means of bypassing it. Dreamlike, the film juxtaposes testimonies of detention with footage of the landscapes outside. A line of a poem flickers onto the screen: ‘the imaginative mind creates another reality that bypasses the prison walls’. 

Language too becomes an important tool of subversion. A woman tells of singing with her fellow prisoners, ‘singing to the land’ as a way of collectively remembering it. A brief line of poetry speaks of ‘writing as an operation of bypassing’; hands unfurl a tightly rolled fragment of writing, disguised as a cigarette. 

Like any witness to an archive, the visitor acknowledges and lends legitimacy to the real experience of oppressions; the experiential nature of Prisoners of Love makes this yet more potent. The audience becomes avenues of transmission from the confined space to the world outside.

Prisoners of Love offers not just a testimony of suffering, but an archive of voices built in defiance of their continual erasure. It brings attention to the necessarily multi-layered confinements Palestinians face, including the attempted systematic erasure of a collective identity. That the visitor becomes entangled with this so unequivocally is one of the most powerful political contributions of the work. 

Echoes remain, long after you re-enter the daylight outside. Though you may leave the prison, it does not so soon leave you.

Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom is showcased at the Nottingham Contemporary until Sunday 11 January.

nottinghamcontemporary.org