New York- and Ramallah-based Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme present *Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom* (2025), an hour-long four-channel film installation at The Bell/Brown Arts Institute in Providence. The work layers psychedelic imagery of figures in nature with spoken and written testimonies from Palestinians formerly detained by Israeli authorities, exploring themes of incarceration, surveillance, and resistance through fragmented montage and poetic text. The exhibition also includes drawings by Abou-Rahme’s father and printed screenshots of reflections on the genocide in Gaza.
The installation matters because it exemplifies how Abbas and Abou-Rahme operate as archivists and activists, using art to frame and disseminate suppressed information about illegal occupation, unlawful detention, and torture. By foregrounding Palestinian voices while openly embracing editorial fragmentation and poetic disjunction, the artists resist simplistic narratives and instead render personal evidence in a way that feels truer to the complexity of lived experience under occupation. The work also physically immerses viewers in a prisonlike claustrophobia, translating political critique into a visceral spatial encounter.