A polyphonic meditation on captivity, resistance, voices that refuse erasure, and the enduring poetics of freedom.
In ‘Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom’, presented at MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme construct an immersive installation that does not simply recount history but dwells within its ruptures, absences, and unresolved echoes. Emerging from the lived and ongoing realities of Palestinian incarceration, the work unfolds as a fugitive, sensorial archive of sound, memory, and poetic utterance, where voices once confined continue to reverberate beyond the architectures designed to silence them. Refusing the authority of linear narrative and resisting the demand for clarity or closure, Abbas and Abou-Rahme assemble a constellation of testimonies, songs, fragments, and spectral traces that slip between presence and disappearance, between the intimate and the collective. What takes shape is not a singular story, but a shifting, polyphonic terrain, where language falters, where sound carries what cannot be fully spoken, and where the persistence of voice – fragile, defiant, unresolved – becomes an enduring gesture against erasure.
26 May 2026
Installation view, Prisoners of Love. Image courtesy of Juande Jarillo.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: How do you understand the relationship between sound and memory shaping the viewer’s encounters with histories of confinement and resilience?
Ruanne Abou-Rahme: A central aspect of our research has been an ongoing engagement with song and singing in prison, and the extent to which singing becomes integral to resisting a system designed to break the prisoner. At the same time, it is a crucial means through which those who have been isolated recall and reconstitute the outside world. This emerged repeatedly in our conversations with former prisoners.
Specific songs did not simply return them to memories; they returned them to themselves. They evoked loved ones, but also the very conditions of their imprisonment, the act of resisting a colonial regime. In this sense, the relationship between sound and memory in the work emerges from an understanding of song as a life-sustaining practice, one that maintains a vital connection to the outside.
It is also a form of collectivity. Prisoners sing between cells, producing a shared sonic body within a system that seeks to dismantle any possibility of collective life. When composing the soundscape, we were thinking closely about this, as well as how sound itself is transformed within the prison’s architecture and how perception shifts under conditions of confinement.
The work attempts to hold these tensions: moments that register as recollection, as refusal, as a return to oneself and to a collectivity.
Installation view, Prisoners of Love. Image courtesy of Juande Jarillo.
How does this focus complicate conventional archival or documentary forms in contemporary art?
Basel and I have long held a certain weariness toward the documentary form. As Palestinians, we are a people who have been hyper-documented, often in ways that are reductive, that render us objects of the archive rather than its agents.
Our practice turns instead toward what might be understood as an embodied, living archive. Not one that produces documents or evidence, since these structures so often reproduce systems of repression, but one that operates through aesthetic and sonic means.
We are not invested in producing more evidence, particularly when it is clear that evidence is never enough. What we have witnessed is that the issue is not the absence of proof, but the persistence of structural racism and colonial power.
So the work seeks to resist forms of capture and dominant modes of seeing and knowing. We think through ideas of the “negative”, how to inhabit it, how to see from it, how to work through it formally as well as conceptually.
Form, for us, is not secondary. It is the site through which resistance is articulated, a refusal of the colonial gaze, and an attempt to open onto other modalities of perception that operate on affective and sensory registers. We do not begin from the burden of producing evidence; we begin from what is already evident.
Installation view, Prisoners of Love. Image courtesy of Juande Jarillo.
How do nonlinear narrative structures speak to broader experiences of displacement, erasure, and collective imagination?
When we began working together, Palestine was often framed as a singular, isolated issue. It was crucial for us to resituate it within broader histories of struggle, to trace resonances and kinships across different sites of dispossession.
This isolation operates not only spatially, but temporally, through a flattening of time, a kind of enforced amnesia. Working nonlinearly allows us to insist that different temporalities continue to unfold within the present, that histories are not past but active, resonant, and ongoing.
This is also a refusal of a colonial-capitalist framework that fragments and disconnects struggles. For us, Palestine is not an exception but part of a continuum of anti-colonial struggle. It is deeply entangled with global histories of racial and colonial subjugation.
In this sense, we move beyond solidarity toward kinship, toward a space that can hold multiplicity while recognising shared ground. These concerns inform our formal strategies: a refusal of linearity and an investment in the imaginary.
What is at stake is not only material destruction, but the destruction of the capacity to imagine otherwise. We are living within systems that seek to annihilate possibility itself. As artists, our task is to rupture that foreclosure, to reopen the space of the possible.
At the same time, we confront a machinery of erasure that operates across registers: the physical erasure of people, and the erasure of story, testimony, and cultural production. In the current genocide, this has been starkly visible in the systematic targeting of journalists, artists, and writers.
This violence is mirrored elsewhere through censorship. It is not separate, but continuous. Our work exists within this field of erasure and against it.
Installation view, Prisoners of Love. Image courtesy of Juande Jarillo.
How does emotion function as both a political force and an artistic material in the work?
At its core, the work asks: why do people resist? And the answer, quite simply, is love. This is why the work is titled ‘Prisoners of Love’.
In Palestine, resistance is deeply rooted in love, for land, for community, for life itself. Yet in many external analyses of resistance, this dimension is often absent.
In an earlier project, we traced how love songs were transformed into songs of anti-colonial resistance. What emerges is a continuity: love as a force that cannot be severed, even under conditions of extreme violence.
People do not resist for abstract ideological reasons. They resist holding onto what is beloved in the face of a system that seeks to destroy it.
Emotion, love, grief, and heartbreak are inseparable from political life. The political is not abstract; it is embedded in the conditions of everyday existence, in the struggle to make life possible under impossible circumstances.
Within Palestinian culture, these emotional registers coexist: love and loss, endurance and devastation. The work attempts to hold this simultaneity: to make space for grief, but also for the life-sustaining force of love that underpins ongoing resistance.
This is also a refusal of colonial narratives about the colonised. We begin from our own terms, from our own understanding of why we resist.
Installation view, Prisoners of Love. Image courtesy of Juande Jarillo.
How does the spatial choreography of the installation alter traditional spectatorship?
For us, it was essential to rethink the relationship between the work and its viewer. Having grown up in Palestine, we understand that colonisation operates at every level – including the body itself.
We wanted to create a space in which the viewer is implicated – where the distance of passive observation is disrupted. That distance is not neutral; it is historically produced, tied to privilege and detachment.
The work can be overwhelming, and this is intentional. It resists the comfort of a smooth, consumable experience.
We work with fragmentation, with partial visibility. There is no totalising gaze here, no position from which everything can be fully seen or mastered. This is a direct challenge to a Western colonial logic of vision.
Instead, perception is complicated. Certain elements are coded, legible in different ways depending on one’s experiences. Not everything is immediately accessible.
The work also operates physically. Sound moves through the body; frequencies resonate internally. The viewer is not outside the work, but within it.
What emerges is an experience marked by rupture and disjunction.
Installation view, Prisoners of Love. Image courtesy of Juande Jarillo.
What conversations do you hope ‘Prisoners of Love’ initiates about art’s capacity to bear witness, imagine futures, and honour marginalised voices?
In Palestine, as in apartheid South Africa, artists, writers, and journalists have been systematically targeted. Many have been imprisoned; many have been killed.
This reality fundamentally challenges the notion, still prevalent in Western contexts, that art is somehow neutral or inconsequential. Cultural production is central to struggles for liberation, and systems of power treat it as such.
So the question becomes: what does one do with one’s practice?
For us, the work is not only about bearing witness. It carries a call, a call toward freedom, toward a world not governed by systems of extraction and annihilation.
The work asks something of its audience. If you can hear it, what will you do where you are, with what you have?
While developing the piece, I was working on a section related to what Palestinians often refer to as “the sun of freedom.” During that time, the journalist Anis al-Sharif was killed. In his will, he called on others to continue resisting until the sun of freedom.
That moment was profoundly affecting. It clarified something for me: that the work must carry that call forward, that it needs to be heard again, taken up again.
Ultimately, our work is about honouring practices of resistance and sustaining the conditions that allow them to continue to resonate.
The exhibition is on view at MACBA in Barcelona until 28 September 2026.
