In December of 2020, Palestinian artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme launched Part I of their project May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth through the Dia Art Foundation’s Artist Web Projects series. Subtitled Postscript: After everything is extracted, the exhibition — part of a wave of online shows in the first year of the pandemic — compiled found footage from border-zone communities in Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, and Syria, along with videos by the artists to compose what Rea McNamara described in a 2021 Hyperallergic article as a “core narrative about moving through grief and loss during COVID-19.”
Grief and loss are still main themes in Part II of the web project, which launched in 2022, but the perpetrators and casualties have changed. At a time when such narratives have become increasingly mediated and manipulated in the public and virtual sphere, the duo’s own content has accordingly taken a backseat to nearly 170 found recordings depicting protests, gatherings, and above all, song — against a backdrop of private homes and public spaces, people perform and sing, mainly in Arabic. English translations of song lyrics and information about the individual videos are available, while an index helps visitors navigate the site.
By layering clips that can be played simultaneously, the online project loosely echoes in-person exhibitions, which were presented as immersive multichannel sound and video installations at the Museum of Modern Art and other venues in recent years. But the easy access the online project provides to information about the videos, including people, places, and descriptions of events, is crucial context for visitors far removed from the subject matter. Importantly, the site breaks the social media cycle of offering up image and sound bites that erase the identities of those pictured, before the videos themselves are erased: Many of the archived clips are otherwise long gone from the internet.
The online exhibition’s title suggests a desire to remember, or perhaps even more so, anxiety at the thought of forgetting the individual and collective experiences of everyday resistance and resilience. If the project is essentially, as the Dia website states, about bearing witness to “violence, loss, displacement, and forced migration through performance,” what of this can we remember and how can these memories translate into expressions of resistance?
Now more than ever, as questions and opposition are quelled in the United States by strategic governmental efforts to expunge words, names, and archives, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth proposes that holding onto these moments is a powerful political act. Watching on our computers, the project may not seem to make an immediate difference, but as long as it remains available, the videos claim place against displacement, identity against anonymity, existence against eradication.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth continues online long term as part of the Dia Foundation’s Artist Web Project series. The exhibition was curated by Kelly Kivland with Dia’s curatorial assistant Theodora Bocanegra Lang. The digital platform was programmed by Lukas Eigler-Harding.
