A Politics of Publishing: A Conversation with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Taking the contemporary moment in Palestine as a starting point, New York and Ramallah-based artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme address the eclipsing of political radicality and the search for a new political imaginary in the first US presentation of their sprawling, multi-segmented installation The Incidental Insurgents (2012–present). In The Incidental Insurgents: The Part about the Bandits and Part II: The Unforgiving Years, the first two chapters of their trilogy, Abbas and Abou-Rahme fold Jean-Luc Godard into Roberto Bolaño into Victor Serge, using a suspiciously slick video component and a convoluted script made of sampled text and images. The installation was most recently exhibited at the 2014 Bienal de São Paulo.