Copenhagen Contemporary

With their thought-provoking and visually striking works, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme fill two of Copenhagen’s largest art institutions with electronic soundscapes, sampled archival material, 3D-printed ancient masks and images layered with quotes from critical and poetic texts in Arabic and English. The twopart exhibition, The song is the call and the land is calling, which unfolds at both institutions simultaneously, dives into the profound connection between cultural heritage and identity, and draws connections between narratives of struggle and shared dreams of liberation across different lands, histories and political contexts. The exhibition, which is one of the artists’ most comprehensive institutional shows to date, is the second in a three-year collaboration between Copenhagen Contemporary and the Glyptotek.

At the heart of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s artistic practice is a profound inquiry into collective memory and the power of cultural expression. With backgrounds in sound and experimental film, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme have developed an internationally renowned body of work that encompasses video, sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Often evolving as longterm research projects, their works unfold as immersive multi-layered media installations, delving into themes of collective spirit, belonging and selfdetermination amidst histories of loss, violence and displacement.

As a two-part cross institutional exhibition, The song is the call and the land is calling puts on view several of Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s key works in new and expanded iterations, as well as a new work based on the Glyptotek’s ancient collection. The exhibition unfolds in the slippages between erasures and reappearances, dispossession and resistance, histories of colonialism and attempts at new livelihoods, exploring how histories of collective resilience resonate in our contemporary cultures. By referring to their works as ‘poetics of resistance’, the artists highlight their enduring interest in how marginalised communities can mobilise hope and collectively foster new social and political potentials despite living with the consequences of oppressive political systems.

Speaking about their own experience as Palestinians, the artists elaborate: “Because you’re in this continual state of precarity [as Palestinians], you have this constant sense that you don’t actually exist. This idea of breathing where you should not be able to breathe is also a question of continuing to be, continuing to claim yourself, to claim space and to claim narrative, to claim your story and your testimony. We started thinking a lot about how to exist, then, in these impossible conditions. What are the tools that we can use not just to survive, but also to generate different possibilities?”

With this year’s exhibition, Copenhagen Contemporary and the Glyptotek seek to investigate the deep connections between cultural heritage and identity by asking: What is the place and power of cultural heritage when forces of imperialism and colonial occupation threaten to uproot and erase entire communities from a land? How can the perception of cultural heritage be strengthened, not merely as relics of the past but also as immaterial culture, acting as living testimonies to the resilience, creativity and ingenuity of humanity? And, ultimately, how can cultural heritage in all its various forms be a question of human rights and the freedom to selfdetermination?

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s presentation at Copenhagen Contemporary will take shape as a new site-specific iteration of three combined works: the immersive multi-channel sound and video installation May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth: Only sounds that tremble through us (2020–22), the sculptural installation Where the soil has been disturbed (2022) and the textile banner piece Low cloud hum (2023).

May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth is a multi-part research project examining how disintegrated communities bear witness to experiences of violence, loss, displacement and forced migration through performance. Since the early 2010s, Abbas and Abou-Rahme have collected online recordings of people singing and dancing in communal spaces in Iraq, Palestine, Yemen and Syria. Accompanied by new sound compositions and poetic text excerpts, the work brings these recordings together with new filmic performances conceived by the artists with dancers and musicians from Palestine.

According to Abbas and Abou-Rahme, the common denominator of these fractured communities is their efforts to resist their own erasure and – through acts of performative agency – lay claim to space, self and collectivity once more. Zooming in on ephemeral bodily expressions, like singing or dancing, the artists point to the physical act of performance – both in solitary and collective forms – as a critical space for resilience and an ever-evolving repository of memory