Being the negative

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme have been developing a practice that examines the idea of ‘being in the negative’ as a principle form of ongoing dispossession, and the call to ‘becoming the negative’ as a movement towards becoming unbound from colonial capture. First appearing in their work in 2019 and emerging from witnessing the Great March of Return in Gaza and its aftereffects in the Palestinian imaginary, the work is indebted to the multiple forms of resistance and refusal practiced in Palestine every day. In their multidisciplinary practice the space of the negative continues to occupy a principal dimension, asking what it means to resist in impossible conditions, to refuse the terrain as given: What does it mean to breathe where one should not breathe? To emerge from the site of exclusion and extraction unbound? Unfolding through poetics of abstraction and repetition, Being the negative offers Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s first theoretical and discursive consolidation of being in, becoming, and embracing the negative.Accompanying their text are images from their works, and drawings by the late Tawfik Abou-Rahme, Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s father. These materialize an intergenerational conversation of perseverance and resistance, as with each piece of paper an aesthetic of indebtedness and inheritance is written and rewritten.