Heather Holmes Reflects on Basel & Ruanne's *The Incidental Insurgents* in *The New Inquiry*

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, *Incidental Insurgents* (still, 2012)

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, *The Incidental Insurgents: The Part about the Bandits*, video still, 2012. Courtesy of the artists and Carroll/Fletcher Gallery.

Former curatorial intern & student advisory board member Heather Holmes writes about Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s The Incidental Insurgents at the Institute of Contemporary Art for The New Inquiry.

“The state archive—more or less inaccessible, its mechanisms rendered invisible and steeped in age and history—sees its foil in The Incidental Insurgents, an ongoing multimedia installation by the Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. The Incidental Insurgents—both the product of the artists’ archival research and an archive in and of itself—complicates spectatorial notions of what an archive is, how it should look and feel, the material it should contain. More importantly, though, Basel and Ruanne treat the materiality of the archive centrally, rather than as an impediment or an afterthought.”