ROTTERDAM.- This spring, Kunstinstituut Melly presents a new season of exhibitions opening across April and May 2026. On April 18, two solo exhibitions open as part of the ongoing series Call & Response. A group exhibition, Draw Redraw Withdraw, will follow on May 23.

Call & Response

Call & Response brings artists into proximity whose practices resonate with one another. The series reflects Kunstinstituut Melly’s commitment to supporting artists whose work engages with geopolitical demands while imagining new possibilities. This season presents exhibitions by Hajra Waheed and by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. In both, the artists situate viewers within ongoing conditions that call for sustained attention and attunement, attesting to sound as both a political and liberatory force.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom
Opening April 18, 2026

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme create multimedia installations that engage the politics and poetics of anti-colonial resistance while tracing struggles against dispossession and oppression in Palestine. Working together since 2007, their practice combines moving image, sound, and text to explore how histories of refusal are carried across time.

Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom draws on a process of study: learning with and from former Palestinian prisoners, poets, revolutionary thinkers, and the many practices of refusal that continue to shape daily life in Palestine. Through this approach, the installation traces connections across generations, approaching resistance as an ongoing practice of study while acknowledging a broader indebtedness to those who have resisted before us.

In this new commission, Basel and Ruanne ask: what does it mean to resist in impossible conditions, to breathe where one should not breathe, and to emerge from sites of exclusion unbound? Writing, storytelling, and song emerge as life-affirming acts that sustain the capacity to continue resisting, even within conditions designed to confine the body and imagination. Through the sampling and layering of moving image and sound, the pair construct what they describe as “new scripts,” forming a poetics of resistance.

Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom is co-commissioned by Kunstinstituut Melly in collaboration with The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, Brown University; MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; and Nottingham Contemporary.

Hajra Waheed
There Is a Fountain Even If Pale That Flows Beneath Us All
Opening April 18, 2026

Guest curated by Hera Chan

Hajra Waheed is a multidisciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, sound, sculpture, video, and installation. Her practice explores the nature of power, the human impact of displacement and incarceration, and the transformative possibilities of liberation struggles.

There Is a Fountain Even If Pale That Flows Beneath Us All brings together newly commissioned and recent works that approach listening as an embodied, collective, and political practice. The title invokes an undercurrent that persists beneath regimes of repression, where expression defiantly circulates despite attempts to silence it.

At the center is HUM (2020), the first volume in Waheed’s trilogy of multichannel sound installations, which foregrounds political prisoners as leaders of liberation struggles and traces voice under conditions of incarceration. The singers and songwriters featured in the work have all been imprisoned—their work censored, with many forced into exile for mobilizing collective voice. The songs are drawn from a period, as today, marked by state violence and genocide, mass uprisings, and crackdowns. From this shared condition of silencing, the work turns to humming as both a compositional method and a language of resistance.

In parallel to HUM, the exhibition presents a series of sound studies; drawings, paintings, handbound artist books, and leporellos—many shown for the first time. Created over the years alongside sound chamber designs for HUM, these works extend Waheed’s sonic practice across mediums, where line, mark, and landscape become shared fields of attunement.

Group exhibition: Draw Withdraw Redraw
Opening May 23, 2026

Draw Withdraw Redraw, a group exhibition featuring work by AYO, Bani Abidi, Cinthia Marcelle, Felipe Mujica, Misheck Masamvu, Nohemi Perez, and Thierry Oussou.

To draw, drawing from, drawing with, drawn to, to being drawn in, a draw– - returning to the drawing board as a space to rethink and make new plans for a desired waywardness.

Drawing to leave a mark on paper, on fabric, on the ground […] drawing to create movement [...] drawing to extract [...] drawing in the game of chance [...] drawing to neither lose nor win [...] Departing from the extended sense of drawing, Draw Withdraw Redraw foregrounds recognition, resistance, and reinvention.

To draw, withdraw, redraw situates us in a state of ongoingness, returning to the same that is not the same. Movement seeks flight without yearning to land. There is constant negotiation, chance-taking and self-preservation, because we never left drawing… because drawing is where we can always pull from…To draw, drawing from, drawing with, drawn to, to being drawn in, a draw.