Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s exhibition “And yet my mask is powerful” followed the same formal logic the artists honed in their three-part project The Incidental Insurgents, 2011–15, which combined a range of reference points—from Jean-Luc Godard to Victor Serge and Roberto Bolaño—into an archive assemblage and film installation. But whereas The Incidental Insurgents presents a kind of road trip, this exhibition offered a journey on foot and up close, expressed through a collection of objects, documents, and notes, and an immersive multiscreen video projection about a group of young Palestinians exploring various locations around their homeland. The video’s text (in English and in Arabic) is taken from Adrienne Rich’s 1972 poem “Diving into the Wreck,” the extracted lines forming an abstract narrative of the search for a wreck (THE THING ITSELF / AND NOT THE MYTH) as they flash over moving images or black screen.
One section of the film’s loop offers a succinct description of its narrative trajectory—a journey that starts overland, through forests and fields, then moves underground into the tunnel of a ruin: FIRST / THE AIR / IS BLUE / THEN GREEN / THEN BLACK. The words flash repeatedly over footage of people walking through a forest, until the pace quickens and the text changes to I AM BLACKING OUT. The screen goes dark for a moment, then the journey continues. The sequence embodies the film’s oscillation between objectivity and intensity. When the protagonists reach “the wreck,” for example—in fact the site of a destroyed Palestinian village—lines from Rich’s poem refer to loading a camera and checking the edge of a knife blade after reading a book of myths in which the protagonists’ names do not appear. Between these words, we see close-up shots of a hand holding a rock—the basic weapon of civilian protestors—revealing the lingering rage that shimmers throughout the film’s formal reserve, its compositional abstraction merely a protective cover. This points back to the exhibition’s title, and thus to what Rich’s poem refers to as a “grave and awkward mask” that is employed by people who have used it before. This mask is at once a metaphor for the formal composition of the work itself, and a reference to the black, 3-D print of a Neolithic mask that each person in the film holds to cover his or her face when turning toward the camera. These prints are modeled on one of many similar masks that have been discovered throughout the West Bank, and which are now found in private collections around the world. (The 3-D print, the artists have said, symbolizes a hack into these collections.)
There are echoes here of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), in which Fanon identified projections and shields used by both the colonized (to blend in with their masters) and the colonizers (who turn the colonized into versions of themselves). But the idea of masking also recalls the formal abstraction Abbas and Abou-Rahme employ to communicate a complexity of positions without explicitly stating them. This intention was underscored by the collection of material grouped in another room, which included plants, stones, and rocks brought directly from Palestine; tables on which photographic images of Neolithic masks were presented alongside texts, maps, and 3-D prints of the masks themselves; and various cork boards on which a variety of images and documents were presented, including one related to the thirteenth-century Mongol attack on Baghdad, during which so many books from the House of Wisdom were thrown into the River Tigris that the waters are said to have turned black.Here, the conditions of loss and being lost were united in their material abstraction: at once unwaveringly particular and enduringly universal.
—Stephanie Bailey
