Skip to content Skip to footer links

New Multipart Project by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme to Launch As Part of Dia’s Artist Web Projects on December 10, 2020

A co-commission between Dia Art Foundation and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020– ) will unfurl in both digital and physical iterations, including multiple virtual chapters and a forthcoming exhibition at MoMA.

New York, New York, November 30, 2020 – Dia Art Foundation and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) are pleased to present a new multipart, co-commissioned work by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020– ). In development for nearly a decade, this project revolves around the artists’ collection of online recordings, featuring everyday people singing and dancing in communal spaces in Iraq, Palestine, and Syria. Through the circulation of this material, the artists examine how people bear witness to and narrate experiences of violence, loss, displacement, and forced migration through performance.

The project will evolve into multiple digital and physical forms. The first phase, subtitled Postscript: After everything is extracted, will launch on December 10, 2020, as part of Dia’s Artist Web Projects—the longest-running web art commissioning series in the United States—and will be accessible for free on Dia’s website. This digital platform will expand in summer 2021 and a subsequent chapter of the project will be presented as an exhibition at MoMA.

“Our series of Artist Web Projects is emblematic of Dia’s interests in supporting artists working in experimental mediums on an ambitious scale. This year, with access to physical spaces remaining restricted, this project feels even more timely and important,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg director. “Following Dia’s three-year engagement with Abbas and Abou-Rahme, we are delighted to now partner with MoMA on this commission, extending the project and offering different ways for the public to encounter the work.”

Abbas and Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation, and performance practices. Engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginations, and virtuality, their work highlights counter-narratives that upend strategies of erasure particular to colonialist structures. 

The title of the project, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth, is lifted from a translation of writer Roberto Bolaño’s Infrarealist Manifesto,” written in Mexico City in 1976. It is at once an indictment of the presiding artistic community’s complacency and an urgent call that artists remain attentive: “May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth. May it never kiss us.” 

This December the project opens with a reflection on the act of mourning, titled Postscript: After everything is extracted. Soon after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down much of the world, the artists gave focus to a piece of writing that they had begun before the lockdown, which speaks to the constant state of grief and pain experienced across virtual and physical spaces. The text will be accompanied by a new sound piece. 

In summer 2021 the platform will evolve to include the artists’ extensive collection of found online recordings of performances that they have archived since the early 2010s in addition to recordings made of original performances, which the artists created with musicians and a dancer in Palestine’s burgeoning underground scene.. The former videos, many of which are no longer accessible online, have been transcribed and translated. The lyrics tell stories of separation, loss, abandonment, and exile, and draw connections between narratives of struggle and shared dreams of liberation. Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s original performances layer forms of embodiment to articulate, in the artists’ words, “a spectral collective—in every gesture, tone, word, or rhythm there is a ‘prior’ inscribed.”

At a later date, MoMA will present the next phase of the project in the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, the museum’s new space for live art and expanded approaches to sound and the moving image. A multichannel sound-and-video installation, the next iteration of the project will bring digital traces of these performing bodies into the gallery. 

Through its multiple parts, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth considers performance—whether in the form of song, spoken word, dance, or gesture—as a political act that traces a contemporary moment marked by various forms of violence. By providing new opportunities to bear witness to and embody overlooked histories, the project insists that communities affected by upheaval in Iraq, Palestine, and Syria, but also around the world, persevere and claim contested spaces. 

May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth gives insight into the lived experiences in Iraq, Palestine, and Syria over the last decade. In an age where social histories are actively censored and mediated, the artists have assembled and preserved a body of knowledge in defiance of its continuous digital erasure,” said Kelly Kivland, Dia curator. 

May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth is co-commissioned by Dia Art Foundation, New York, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth is made possible by support from the Khalid Shoman Foundation-Darat al Funun and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

About Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Basel Abbas was born in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 1983. Ruanne Abou-Rahme was born in Boston in 1983. 

They have exhibited internationally, most recently at Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City, and Disjecta, Portland (2019). They have had additional solo exhibitions at, among others, Kunstverein Hamburg (2018); Alt Bomontiada, Istanbul (2017); Office for Contemporary Art in Oslo (2015); ICA Philadelphia (2014); Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne (2014); and Delfina Foundation, London (2009). In 2015 their work was included in the Sharjah Biennial, where they were awarded the Sharjah Biennial Prize. Abbas and Abou-Rahme both live in New York City and Ramallah. 

About Artist Web Projects
Inaugurated in 1995, Dia’s Artist Web Projects commissions artists to create original projects for the internet and is the longest-running program of the kind in the United States. The series invites artists to realize projects that explore the aesthetic and conceptual potentials of the medium. Dia’s archive of Artist Web Projects are available online here

Dia Art Foundation
Taking its name from the Greek word meaning “through,” Dia was established in 1974 with the mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects, unmediated by overt interpretation and uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s programming fosters contemplative and sustained consideration of a single artist’s body of work and its collection is distinguished by the deep and longstanding relationships that the nonprofit has cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. 

In addition to Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea, Dia maintains and operates a constellation of commissions, long-term installations, and site-specific projects, notably focused on Land art, nationally and internationally. These include: 

  • Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room(1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, inaugurated in 1982 and ongoing), all of which are located in New York City
  • De Maria’s The Lightning Field(1977) in western New Mexico
  • Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty(1970) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah
  • Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels(1973–76) in the Great Basin Desert, Utah
  • De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer(1977) in Kassel, Germany 

###

For additional information or materials, contact: 
Hannah Gompertz, Dia Art Foundation, hgompertz@diaart.org, +1 212 293 5598
Melissa Parsoff, Parsoff Communications, mparsoff@parsoff-communications.com, +1 516 445 5899
(US press inquiries)
Sam Talbot, sam@sam-talbot.com, +44 (0) 772 5184 630 (international press inquiries)

Get Dia News

Receive Dia News and be the first to hear about events and exhibitions happening at our locations and sites.