Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Born 1983, USA 

Lives and works between New York, USA and Palestine 

Until we became fire and fire us 2023-ongoing 

three-channel video, two-channel sound installation with subwoofer, steel panels, archival inkjet prints, sublimation prints on chiffon, looped 32 mins

Presentation at 25th Biennale of Sydney was made possible by Rubaiya Qatar, Qatar Museums 

Courtesy of the artists 

Until we became fire and fire us unfolds as an installation composed of video, sound, image, and text that explores various forms of hauntings, love stories bound to loss, land and self, forms of imprisonment and the call to get free, with sound and song being at the heart of this exploration. The work brings together landscapes, songs, gestures, and fragments of testimony to examine how histories of dispossession persist as ongoing conditions rather than closed events. 

This adaptation brings together personal and collective memory, including drawings made by Abou-Rahme’s father in Jerusalem in the 1970s and 1980s, situating them within the continued colonial violence, resistance, and survival in Palestine. Moving through the installation, visitors encounter a composition of voices, rhythms, and images that resist linear narration. Sound plays a central role, vibrating and activating the space as a site of encounter rather than simply observation. 

Neither documentary nor monument, the work proposes memory as something lived and reanimated through sound and image, a recognition that what has been erased remains active, mutable, and unresolved.