BARCELONA.- Prisoners of Love. Until the Sun of Freedom is the first exhibition by the artists Basel Abbas (Nicosia, Cyprus, 1983) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (Boston, United States, 1983) in the Spanish state. The exhibition will be on display at MACBA from 13 February to 28 September 2026 and is curated by Hiuwai Chu, Head of Exhibitions and Curator at the museum.
The central focus is the eponymous audiovisual installation based on recent research into the resilience of Palestinian prisoners through song and poetry. This piece, which has been reworked for the MACBA exhibition, is a co-production between the Catalan museum, Nottingham Contemporary, The Bell/Brown Arts Institute, Brown University and Kunstinstituut Melly, and forms part of the MACBA Collection.
The exhibition at the Barcelona museum presents earlier creations that trace a trajectory of almost two decades of constant commitment to the poetics and politics of memory, and to the struggle against the plundering and oppression of Palestine and other territories.
Collapse, Screenshots, Desktop Performances and Prisoners of Love. Until the Sun of Freedom bear witness to the unjust realities of exploitation and oppression, both past and present. However, in an apparent paradox, they emphasise the importance of joy, love and collective imagination as powerful forms of resistance, even — and especially — in extreme conditions. Through voices, songs, sounds and images, their pieces envelop the viewer and connect them with the experiences of the protagonists in an artistic exercise that seeks to break the silence in the face of the repression of their people.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme live and work between New York and Ramallah. Of Palestinian descent, they have collaborated since 2007 on projects that integrate image, sound, text and performance. Through the compilation, sampling and superimposition of found and original materials, their multidisciplinary practice excavates, activates and re-situates histories of violence and disenfranchisement, questioning the ways in which we configure, remember and imagine the present.
They have been included in Art Review's Power 100 and will be featured in the upcoming Whitney Biennial in New York. They have presented solo exhibitions at institutions such as Copenhagen Contemporary (2024), Astrup Fearnley Museet (2023), the Museum of Modern Art (2022), The Common Guild, Glasgow (2022), the Art Institute of Chicago (2021), the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2020), the Kunstverein, Hamburg (2018), and the Art Jameel Project Space, Dubai (2017). Their work has also been featured in major international biennials such as the Sharjah Biennial (2023, 2015), the Berlin Biennale (2022), the Busan Biennale (2018), the Gwangju Biennale and the São Paulo Biennale (both in 2014), the Istanbul Biennial (2013), the Liverpool Biennial (2010), and the Venice Biennale (2009).
Prisoners of Love. Until the Sun of Freedom (2025-2026)
Prisoners of Love. Until the Sun of Freedom is an immersive multimedia installation tracing the long history of dispossession and imprisonment of Palestinians from the Nakba of 1948 to the present day. Based on Abbas and Abou-Rahme's research into the experiences of Palestinian prisoners, the installation explores how their political struggle and spirit have endured under harsh prison conditions. Through recordings and first-hand accounts collected throughout the occupied West Bank, the installation interweaves the voices of detainees with poems and texts by academics and revolutionary thinkers — some of whom have been imprisoned — as well as artists, who reflect on confinement, resilience, and justice under regimes of occupation and repression.
These voices form a polyphonic, non-linear narrative that speaks not only of the physical and psychological difficulties of imprisonment, but also of moments of tenderness, joy and creative resistance. Poetry and song emerge as vital practices
through which prisoners reclaim their agency, thus becoming extreme forms of survival that sustain inner freedom even in conditions designed to destroy it.
In one scene, in the film, a woman recalls singing a song she learned in prison, the lyrics of which longed for a prison in ruins. Although she was put in solitary confinement for singing, she explains that it was worth it for the joy and laughter it brought to both her and her fellow prisoners.
The installation unfolds across multiple spaces. The first envelops the viewer in an environment composed of a labyrinth of metal panels with black-and-white photographs and drawings by the late Tawfik Abou-Rahme, Ruanne Abou-Rahme's father, evoking a sense of sadness and trauma. Alongside them are documents, letters and poems in English and Arabic. Some of these same images are printed on sheer fabrics suspended from the ceiling, whose translucency lends them a latent spectral appearance. A projection saturates a screen composed of a series of panels that fracture the moving images. Sometimes fragmented and presented as negatives, the images of drawings, landscapes and bodies are repeated across these many surfaces, oscillating between presence and absence.
Some of these latent images reappear with heightened intensity in the adjoining room, where a three-channel film narrates the prisoners' stories, interwoven with images of their surroundings. Images of the landscape outside the prison walls are present throughout the film, allowing sound and memory to filter outside, beyond the walls of confinement. The presence of native flora — particularly milk thistle, a strong perennial plant capable of growing in dry, rocky soil — emerges as a powerful metaphor for Palestinian resistance and resilience in adverse conditions, underscoring the inseparable connection between people and the land.
The visual and auditory logic of the installation echoes this filtering. The images projected resist being confined, spilling over their frames and spreading across screens, panels and rolls of fabric. The sound composition is dense, enveloping and insistent; it fills the rooms and resonates through the body. The result is a multisensory experience, both intimate and overwhelming, inviting viewers to look, listen and feel.
Intimately linked to notions of overflowing and filtering is the idea of "the negative”, which recurs in the artists' work, in their practice and in their general thinking. The artists describe this state as a form of rejection, which proclaims inhabiting what has been denied and transforming it into a place of possibilities. To exist in the negative is to occupy a space of denial, erasure and restriction, but it is precisely from this space of lack from which alternative forms of life and imagination emerge. This concept is materialised through inverted images, voices that persist despite attempts to silence them, and songs that filter through doors and walls.
As a complement to the main rooms of the installation, a new series of engravings and projections — specifically designed for this space at MACBA — are also presented, displayed in cell-like niches. These works explore writing — a fundamental process in the artists' practice — as a space for inhabiting memory and as an act of resistance, even in prison where access to paper and pencil is prohibited.
The last cell recounts the transnational journey of the poem ‘Enemy of the Sun’ by Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim. For decades after its publication in the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, the poem was mistakenly attributed to Black Panther revolutionary and member George Jackson, after a handwritten copy was found in his cell following his assassination in 1971. When the error was discovered, it was interpreted as a sign of the powerful link between the Black and Palestinian struggles, a testament to the shared languages of resistance that transcend borders and contexts.
Like the actions of the Palestinian Prisoners Movement — thanks to which prisons became places of collective learning, resistance and political awareness — the installation explores how song and poetry can resonate beyond physical borders, becoming transformative forces that sustain hope and affirm life's joy, even in impossible conditions.
Collapse (2009)
Collapse, the first collaborative work between the duo, is a reflection on the resonance between real and imagined moments of resistance and loss. While Prisoners of Love (2024–2026) is based on recently recorded testimonies, Collapse is constructed from overlapping fragments of black-and-white archival material, both fictional and documentary. It draws on films such as El-Bab el-Maftooh (Henry Barakat, 1963), Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925), The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) and In Search of Palestine: Edward Said's Return Home (Charles Bruce, 1998).
The video begins with an ambiguous image of a woman, floating, falling or suspended, marking the tone of a work characterised by uncertainty and disorientation. The gestures are isolated and repetitive: bodies running, fleeing, captured mid-action. These suspended movements evoke panic, urgency and displacement, while resisting a straightforward narrative. As the video progresses, the images become increasingly blurry and out of focus, suggesting the erosion of historical clarity and the instability of memory itself.
Through techniques including sampling, superimposition and repetition, the work dismantles time, geographies, narratives and distinctions between reality and fiction. The struggles of the past resonate in the present, revealing how trauma reverberates across generations and how stories of resistance refuse to become relegated to the past.
Screenshots and Desktop Performances
Prisoners of Love and Collapse are connected by a selection of Screenshots (2014 – present) and Desktop Performances (2021 – present), works that highlight the artists' research processes and the infrastructural conditions by which images and sounds circulate on the Internet.
Like their audiovisual installations, these processes are cumulative and non-linear, linking multiple narratives and sources through juxtaposition and repetition. Here, the desk becomes both a workspace and a stage for fragments of history, news items and personal notes to intersect. By presenting these materials in the exhibition space, Abbas and Abou-Rahme reveal the often invisible tasks of compilation, sampling and recombination that underpin their practice. Screenshots and Desktop Performances function as methodological bridges, emphasising that the circulation of these images — through archives, online platforms and personal devices — is itself a place of political and emotional significance.
