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Power 100

Most influential people in 2025 in the contemporary artworld

23

Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Artist - Bearing witness to Palestine

23 in 2025

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Courtesy Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme

‘We really insist on being with the land,’ Abbas said this year, talking about Enemy of the Sun (2025), a performance and installation work commissioned for the 2025 Aichi Triennale. The land in question is Palestine, the work intercut with imagery of Israeli soldiers harassing Palestinian residents and groups dancing. The Ramallah- and New York-based pair collect their own footage, field recordings and oral histories, as well as using archival and news imagery, mixing it together in often frenetic, anxiety-inducing video installations (the pair met on the UK electronic music scene, and that DNA remains). Their political work, documenting Palestinian life and platforming artists of the region, has won them fans: last year they filled Copenhagen Contemporary and Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek with a show pivoting around May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020–), documenting forced Palestinian displacement through performance. In a show currently at Nottingham Contemporary in the UK, they premiered another new videowork, Prisoners of Love (2025), which bears witness to the confinement stories of Palestinian prisoners.

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