Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Visiting Artist Lecture 2022

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme give a lecture at Skowhegan talking about their interdisciplinary practice which spans writing, film, video, installation, and performance. The artists also talk about ideas of sharing and mentorship, which explore the ways in which they think about how to redistribute the sources and information they have access to others around them. At the core of their work is the relationship that the artists have developed to being intentional with their breath; to be aware of their breath and its intimate relationships to the Palestinian condition, which they have been very aware of from a very young age. The artists question what it means to reflect on their presence as Palestinian artists and how that presence is constantly interrogated. The artists draw from the different materials in their work to not just survive but to create new possibilities for themselves. Abbas and Abou-Rahme also reflect on the dangers of colonial time and how it fossilizes everything, closing off the ability to imagine and root oneself in a sense of futurity. However, the artists also say that pointing at the incomplete nature of colonialism can create a sort of resistance, due to the anxiety that this resistance creates for the colonizer when they are forced to reckon with the incomplete nature of their project. The artists ends with saying that this type of reckoning for the colonizer can create spaces of resistance which the artists are interested in occupying, and how that space is haunted by the people who continue to resist colonialism.