Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom
The only US presentation of this exhibition by renowned artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme is on view at The Bell Gallery, Brown University.
The Bell Gallery at Brown University debuts Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom, an exhibition by internationally renowned sound, video, and installation artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Co-curated by Kate Kraczon, Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator of the Brown Arts Institute (BAI)/The Bell, and Associate Curator Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD, this show marks the project’s only presentation in the United States. It’s on view in Providence, Rhode Island, through May 31.
Drawing on interviews with former political prisoners recorded on location in Palestine, Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom explores poetry, music, and other creative practices as tools of collective survival, resistance, and remembrance within global systems of incarceration. Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s work is rooted in what they describe as the construction of a “vast counter-archive” that documents Palestinian life and political struggle, which cannot be captured by official or institutional archives.
The immersive sound and video installation projects moving images onto surfaces of concrete, fabric, and weathered steel — materials that echo the architecture of prisons and other spaces of confinement. At the center of the installation is “Enemy of the Sun” (1970), a poem by acclaimed Palestinian poet Samih Al-Qasim. Found handwritten in the revolutionary George Jackson’s cell following his 1971 murder in San Quentin Prison, the poem was misattributed to him by the Black Panther newspaper, and this “mistake” remains in popular consciousness. Today, “Enemy of the Sun” survives as a poignant artifact of historical and continuing solidarity between political prisoners in Palestine and the United States.
The show was commissioned by Kraczon in 2020, with Quiray Tagle joining the project in 2023. It builds on the artists’ longstanding relationship with Kraczon, who produced their first US exhibition and catalogue in 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.
Since 2020, Abbas and Abou-Rahme have been engaged with Brown University’s academic and student communities, including collaborations with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and archival research at the John Hay Library’s Voices of Mass Incarceration in the United States project. In Spring 2025, the artists and Quiray Tagle co-taught a research-based course that extended Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s inquiry while inviting students to explore family archives, community-based collections, and other hidden histories of mass incarceration. At The Bell, Prisoners of Love emerges not only as an exhibition, but as an evolving site of collective research, memory, and political imagination.
To learn more, visit bell.brown.edu.
