In this film, missing data in the figures’ faces are replaced with scars and glitches—an inscription of trauma onto the body. This act of flattening people is central to the real impossibility of representing faces and bodies that have been coded as illegal. Text taken from Edward Said’s book After the Last Sky is repurposed to create a new script which reflects on what it means today to be constructed as an “illegal” person, body, or entity.

The work also makes reference to “languages not fully formed”—how does one find the words to describe the ongoing effects of forced displacement? An attempt is made to represent this through “broken narratives, fragmentary compositions, self-consciously staged testimonials where the narrative voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations, its limitations”—an articulation of the contradictions inherent in this kind of documentation.

Themes of disappearance and re-appearance are present throughout. The Great March of Return—which refers to the 18 month demonstrations held every Friday on the Gaza border between March 2018 and December 2019, that demanded the right of Palestinian refugees to land that is now Israel—plays a key role in situating the concerns of diasporic Palestinians in the present tense. To film on the Gaza strip is itself an important act of witnessing; the area has been under near constant siege since 2006; Abbas and Abou-Rahme film border walls. Can liberation be found through attempting to live in a site of displacement and protest? —Myriam Mouflih

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (1983, Nicosia, Cyprus and Boston, USA) are an artist duo based between Ramallah and New York. They work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Across their works they probe a contemporary landscape marked by seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless ‘present’, one that is shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. They have been developing a body of work that questions this suspension of the present and searches for ways in which an altogether different imaginary and language can emerge that is not bound within colonial/capitalist narrative and discourse. They have performed at several institutions including the Live Arts Bard Biennale 19 (New York), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Images Festival (Copenhagen) and the Serpentine (London). Their work has been exhibited at venues including the Beirut Art Center, Kunstverein (Hamburg), Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge) and at the Sharjah and Istanbul biennials. They won the Abraaj Group Art Prize in 2016 and were shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize in 2019.

At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other (2019), Oh Shining Star Testify (2019), And Yet My Mask is Powerful, Part 1 (2016-2018), Only the Beloved Keeps Our Secrets (2016), The Incidental Insurgents: The Part About the Bandits, Part 1, Chapter 1 (2012-2015), The Incidental Insurgents: Unforgiving Years, Part 2 (2012-2015), The Incidental Insurgents. When the Fall of the Dictionary Leaves All Words Lying in the Street, Part 3, Chapter 5 & 6 (2012-2015), The Zone (2011), Lost Objects of Desire (2010), Collapse (2009)