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Power 100

Most influential people in 2024 in the contemporary artworld

71

Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Artist - Bearing witness to Palestine

71 in 2024

  • 202471
  • 2023
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Courtesy Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme

How to make art about Palestine that cuts through the noise and grief? The Ramallah-based pair have taken both Palestine and the wider turbulence of the Arab world as their subject matter for over a decade, establishing a practice that mixes politics with astute technical filmmaking, lyrical poetry and discombobulating soundtracks. Much-praised participation in last year’s Sharjah Biennial 15 (‘a striking installation’, thought Art in America, one that ‘transmitted memory of the dispossession of the Palestinian people in all its bitterness and melancholy’, said Artforum) has been followed in 2024 by solo exhibitions at the Reina Sofía, in Madrid; MIT List Visual Arts Center, in Cambridge, MA (travelling to Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota, in 2025); Copenhagen Contemporary and the Glyptotek; and Coleção Moraes-Barbosa in São Paulo. Visitors to the Venice Biennale had a chance to see their work at Fondazione In Between Art Film, while a European touring show is scheduled to open at Nottingham Contemporary next year. If the aim of their artmaking is to bear witness, then they are increasingly being given space to testify.

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