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May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (Part II) Launch: Conversation and Performance

Saturday, March 5, 2022, 3 pm, Dia Chelsea

Event Details
Saturday, March 5, 3 pm

Dia Chelsea
537 West 22nd Street
New York, New York

Free. Register for the in-person event here.

This event will be livestreamed on Zoom. Register here and receive a link. 

Dia Art Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, are pleased to present a multipart work by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020– ). This evolving project, co-commissioned by Dia and MoMA, is presented online as an Artist Web Project hosted by Dia and as an exhibition at MoMA opening April 23, 2022. The online project launched on December 10, 2020, with Postscript: after everything is extracted, a reflection on the act of mourning. Part II of the project, launching on March 5, 2022, is an expansion of the digital platform that features the artists’ extensive collection of online recordings of people singing and dancing in communal spaces in Iraq, Palestine, and Syria. These are layered with new performances created with dancer Rima Baransi and electronic musicians Haykal, Julmud, and Makimakkuk, from Palestine.

To celebrate the launch of Part II, Dia will host a conversation about the project with writer and curator Omar Berrada; theorist, historian, and artist Jill H. Casid; and Abbas and Abou-Rahme. The discussion will be followed by a DJ set and performance by Julmud, transmitted from Ramallah, Palestine.

Omar Berrada writer and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. Recently he published the poetry collection Clonal Hum (2020) and co-edited La Septième Porte (2021), Ahmed Bouanani’s posthumous history of Moroccan cinema. Berrada lives in New York and teaches at Cooper Union, where he co-organizes the Intra-Disciplinary Seminar public lecture series.

Jill H. Casid is a theorist, historian, and artist. They are professor of visual studies in the departments of art history and gender and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Casid is currently completing Necrolandscaping, the first part of a two-book project titled . They are the author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (2005) and Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (2015) and co-editor of the collection Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (2014). Their work has been displayed nationally and internationally, including in recent exhibitions at the Wriston Art Center, Appleton, Wisconsin; Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin; and signs and symbols, New York.

Julmud is a producer, DJ, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and music researcher based in Ramallah, Palestine, who creates, composes, samples, and combines sounds from across the globe to create his own form of music. He has produced work for various artists such as Haykal, Al Nather, Muqata'a, Makimakkuk, and Walaa Sbait, as well as members of the collective Saleb Wahad, to which he also belongs. He is currently producing a variety of solo and collaborative works. His debut album, Tuqoos, is forthcoming from Bilna'es in March 2022.

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 the Art Institute of Chicago (2021); the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands (2020); Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City (2019); and Disjecta, Portland, Oregon (2019). Their work has additionally been featured in solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Hamburg (2018); Alt Bomontiada, Istanbul (2017); the Office for Contemporary Art, Oslo (2015); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2014); Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne (2014); and the 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 live in both New York City and Ramallah. 

About Artist Web Projects
The Artist Web Projects series was inaugurated in 1995 and remains the longest-running program of its kind in the United States. Dia commissions artists to create original projects for the internet that explore the aesthetic and conceptual potential of the medium. Dia’s archive of Artist Web Projects are accessible online here.

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 the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

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