Prisoners of Love at Brown Turns Archive Into a Living Public Form

At The Bell Gallery, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme stage Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom as an environment where memory is never delivered in stable form. Projections fall across concrete, fabric, and rough steel, so images refuse the polished authority of a single screen. The installation insists on mediation as condition. Nothing appears untouched, and that aesthetic decision carries the political argument of the work.

The project draws from interviews with former political prisoners in Palestine, but it is not structured as documentary closure. Testimony is present, yet continually folded into layered sound, interrupted sequencing, and recurrent visual fragments. Rather than assembling evidence into a definitive narrative, Abbas and Abou-Rahme maintain a state of circulation where voices remain active, unfinished, and relational. The work asks viewers to inhabit a history that is still being contested in real time.

By the second room, a governing thesis becomes clear: archive is not storage, it is struggle. This is a long-standing concern in the duo’s practice, but the Brown presentation sharpens it through material encounter. The installation does not treat history as distant object. It treats history as something that presses into the present through sonic residue, damaged images, and political speech carried across geographies.

One of the crucial anchors is Samih Al-Qasim’s poem Enemy of the Sun, found in George Jackson’s San Quentin cell after his 1971 killing and subsequently misattributed in U.S. activist circulation. Lesser works would present that fact as a neat correction. Abbas and Abou-Rahme do something harder. They examine what the misattribution reveals about transnational solidarities, translation gaps, and the underground channels through which emancipatory language moves when institutions fail to carry it.

This is where the work’s ethics distinguishes itself from much contemporary political installation. The artists do not aestheticize suffering into atmospheric pathos, and they do not simplify solidarity into slogan. Instead, they stage how relation is built through imperfect transmission, partial reading, and repeated acts of listening. The installation acknowledges error without discrediting collective desire. It understands that movements are often sustained precisely through these unstable circuits.

Formally, sound is the project’s central intelligence. It does more than accompany image. It builds an architecture of attention, drawing the body through space while continually reassigning where the eye should settle. At moments the sound field feels intimate, almost whispered, then expands into a denser collective register that resists individual possession. This dynamic between singular voice and choral address mirrors the work’s broader argument about personhood under carceral regimes.

The material staging strengthens this logic. Projected content on non-neutral surfaces introduces friction at every viewing angle. Fabric absorbs light differently than concrete; steel interrupts legibility; edges blur and re-form as the viewer shifts position. These are not decorative installation choices. They externalize the conditions under which memory survives when state narratives seek to flatten or erase it. The environment teaches viewers how to read without expecting clarity as entitlement.

The work also handles time with unusual discipline. Sequences recur with variation rather than simple repetition, so recognition arrives gradually and then destabilizes again. This temporal structure keeps viewers from treating testimony as consumable content. You are asked to stay in relation, to continue listening after the first emotional peak, and to register how meaning changes as fragments return in new juxtapositions.

A major strength is the refusal of geopolitical simplification. The installation draws lines across Palestine, U.S. prison history, and wider anti-colonial vocabularies without flattening those contexts into equivalence. The artists stage relation, not substitution. That distinction is critical, especially in institutional settings where complex political alignments are often translated into generic humanitarian sentiment.

There is also a formal intelligence in how text appears and disappears across the installation. Language is sometimes legible, sometimes submerged in the visual field, sometimes carried only through voice. This modulation reflects the project’s core concern: political speech does not circulate under equal conditions. Some statements are amplified, others obscured, others misnamed, yet all can still exert force inside collective memory.

The Brown context also matters. Commissioned in 2020 and developed through sustained research and teaching engagement, this presentation carries unusual depth for a university gallery setting. It feels less like an imported touring object and more like a site where institutional resources have been used to support long-duration inquiry. That temporal investment is visible in the density of the work, in how references are layered, and in the confidence with which the installation resists summary.

If there is a potential risk, it is one of access. The installation asks for patience, and some viewers may experience its fragmentation as withholding. Yet this risk is integral to the project’s method. To force immediacy would betray the very histories the work addresses. Abbas and Abou-Rahme are not withholding meaning for effect. They are refusing the false transparency that often accompanies institutional representation of political trauma.

Curatorially, the exhibition succeeds because it balances immersion with resistance. Many moving-image installations dealing with violence or displacement drift toward affective saturation, where viewers are moved but not transformed in how they understand structures. Here, affect is present, but tethered to analysis. Confinement appears not as metaphor alone, but as infrastructural condition with legal, spatial, and linguistic dimensions.

The installation is also significant for how it models collective authorship without romanticizing it. Quotations, testimonies, poem fragments, and archival traces are not fused into a single voice. They remain distinct while still participating in shared address. This refusal of seamlessness matters. It keeps the work honest about asymmetry, translation, and uneven legibility in political coalition.

For critics and curators tracking the future of research-based installation, Prisoners of Love offers a rigorous benchmark. It shows that historical investigation and formal invention need not be traded off against each other. The piece is conceptually dense, materially exacting, and emotionally credible because each layer is structurally linked to the next. Nothing is ornamental.

The exhibition also prompts a useful institutional question: what kinds of galleries can hold politically charged work without neutralizing it? At Brown, the project benefits from being presented as sustained inquiry rather than event programming. That distinction is crucial. When institutions treat this kind of work as a short-term relevance signal, complexity collapses. Here, the curatorial frame allows difficulty to remain productive, and the installation retains its capacity to challenge viewers’ habits of reading, listening, and historical alignment.

It is worth noting, too, how carefully the artists avoid visual heroization. There is no singular protagonist who resolves the installation’s tensions, no cathartic final image that allows viewers to exit cleansed. That refusal is politically astute. It keeps attention on structures rather than personalities and reminds us that carceral histories are collective conditions, not isolated tragedies that can be emotionally consumed and set aside.

What lingers after leaving the gallery is not a single iconic image, but a changed sense of what archives do. Abbas and Abou-Rahme suggest that archives can operate as active social form, a way to keep relation alive across prisons, languages, and political time. In Providence, that proposition lands with uncommon precision. Prisoners of Love is one of the more serious recent examples of how contemporary installation can hold memory, critique, and solidarity in the same room without reducing any of them.