There is no shortage of complexity – aesthetic or conceptual – in the Palestinian artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s show An echo buried deep deep down but calling still at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo. While navigating their audiovisual installations filled to the brim with videos, visitors cannot avoid walking into one or more projection beams and casting outsized silhouettes against a wall or a screen.
The sense of constantly standing in the way, of being watched or ‘lit up’ against barrier-like surfaces is clearly meant to evoke the physical experiences of people who live in occupied territories, or who are defined as unwanted by the state and thus are subject to suspicion, surveillance, and military control. In the museum’s main hall, the four-channel video installation May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth: Only sounds that tremble through us (2022) fills the room with purple light. Here, we see found videos of songs and dances from Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, as well clips of dancers interpreting the same material in a choreography developed with the artists. The video material is projected onto the gallery walls and free-standing screens in front of which an array of deliberately arranged modules break up each image into several differently sized, rectangular fields.
Text appears frequently, often in the form of short phrases such as “hold breath” followed by “sing,” and the occasional longer sentence such as: “the sleep of the privileged is forbidden to us.” All of the videos alternate between normal and inverted colours, and the editing is paced to match the rhythm of the dynamic and pulsating sound design. The soundscape itself encompasses everything from mildly aggressive techno (think Fatima Al Qadiri or Vatican Shadow’s respective albums on themes of war and conflict) to blissful religious chants and near-silence evocative of a desert at night. Indeed, imagery of desert landscapes also appears in several of the video sequences.
To me, it seems like May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth is less about stitching together a cohesive narrative about colonial occupation and resultant cultural impoverishment in the Middle East than it is about giving shape to a specific affective mode – persistent fear and uncertainty – that characterises the everyday life of many people in that part of the world. The fragmentation of moving images across several surfaces – an approach used in almost all of the installations in the exhibition – is perhaps an attempt to find a form that mirrors cultures, landscapes, lives, and traditions that have been damaged or destroyed by years of war, occupation, and trauma. At the same time, it seems as if Abbas and Abou-Rahme find creative potential in that very fragmentation.
The latter makes me think of the ambiguous way in which the concept of “creolisation” is used in much postcolonial theory. Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) uses the term to refer to the cultures that arose in the context of slavery and colonialism. Africans who were enslaved and taken to plantations in the West Indies, South America, and the United States brought with them religions, languages, and practices that over time mixed and merged with not only each other, but also with European and Indigenous cultures. The collective trauma of slavery propelled a pluralistic – that is, creolised – culture which, with its multitude of commingling language traditions, rituals, and religious practices makes it difficult to claim that there is any single “authentic” tradition. This intermingling stands as a bulwark against nationalist and other jingoistic claims to a single coherent history and unified identity. Despite its terrible historical causes, such fragmentation carries a potential for a vibrant multiculturalism, a counterpoint to the idea that a living culture must rest on universal values and a single language. Perhaps Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s work is about an emerging diasporic community that has arisen as a result of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the US and European wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ongoing aftermath of these wars in places like Syria. Perhaps something new is growing out of this trauma, too.
The cultural cross-pollination outlined above is further complicated by Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s many visual references to digital networks and production processes, especially in the installation And yet my mask is more powerful part 2 (2018), on display in the elongated low room on the museum’s second floor. The work incorporates 3D-printed copies of Neolithic masks, dried flowers and plants, and handwritten notes, as well as prints of images found online. The latter are pasted directly on deep blue walls; file names and parts of the Mac OS X user interface are legible. An image of a sculpture with a damaged face – which, according to the file name, is from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art – is affixed atop an aerial photograph of a refugee camp. Again, we might well get the impression that this fragmentary approach reflects a cultural impoverishment caused by war and occupation, as well as other colonial instruments.
On the second-floor mezzanine overlooking the main hall, a number of barriers are arranged in a V formation. Some are made of rusted steel, others of concrete. Decorated with text fragments and images, they comprise the installation Where the soil has been disturbed (2022–23). Some are also surrounded by dried thistles, which appear swaying in the wind projected on the wall near the barriers and frequently elsewhere in the exhibition. After the press viewing, I asked the artists about the thistles’ symbolic significance. They explained that the plant tends to grow where the soil has been polluted by heavy metals and chemicals dispersed by munitions. As such, they are often found at sites of former villages in Palestine and Syria. They constitute a material trace indicative of communities that have been erased, but are also a poetic symbol of the possibility of something new flowering. This ambiguous oscillation between destruction and creation – and between digital and physical traces of cultures – is the aesthetic and intellectual backbone of this exhibition.
Although the international contemporary art scene has been interested in postcolonial perspectives at least since Okwui Enwezor curated Documenta 11 in 2002 – where the concept of creolisation was also thematised – art institutions in Norway have only recently begun to express an interest in this discourse and the artists associated with it. Sandra Mujinga, Frida Orupabo, and Ahmed Umar – all artists who address hybrid identities that transcend the national – have, in very little time, become some of the most acclaimed Norwegian artists of their generation. However, it is important to note that the careers of the first two artists mentioned gained momentum because of shows in institutions outside of Norway. Often, Norwegian institutions struggle to contribute to and discuss postcolonial discourse. This was, for example, the case a few weeks ago when the director of the National Museum of Norway’s collections department Stina Högkvist called Christian Krohg’s painting Leiv Eiriksson Discovering America (1893) “colonialist” in a newspaper interview and subsequently withdrew the comment without explaining her stance.
This exhibition’s voracious revelling in hybrid cultural fragments across digital networks and borders in the Middle East reminds us that there are other approaches to understanding identity than as a by-product of a singular and coherent national heritage. This perspective seems especially relevant in Norway right now, considering the stream of outrage prompted by Högkvist’s remark about the Krohg painting – much of which seems to reject the very idea that Norway could be implicated in European colonialism. Perhaps we, too, could free ourselves from the idea that there exists a single, unassailable narrative about “the Norwegian.”
