Presentation by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, with Adam HajYahia | Activity
Important notice: Due to the restrictions resulting from the activation of the Special Emergency Plan for strong wind risk, this activity has been postponed until Saturday 14 February 2026, at 12:00 p.m.
For the opening of the exhibition Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedomthe artists will discuss their research for the installation that is the core of the exhibition, focusing on the songs, poems and everyday acts of resistance of prisoners.
Abbas and Abou-Rahme work with apparently incidental narratives, figures, gestures and spaces as material to reimagine the possibilities of the present and ultimately to question what it is and what it could be. Firsthand recordings, testimonies and stories of former prisoners build upon the artists’ expansive archive and are layered with poems and prose examining detention and freedom, resilience, and the fight for justice within regimes of occupation and oppression. By layering and sampling audio-visual materials that are both existing and self-authored, the artists create what they refer to as “new scripts” or “poetics of resistance”, which investigate the political, visceral and material possibilities of sound, image, text and site.
Adam HajYahia is a writer and curator.
participant
Adam HajYahia’s work examines how aesthetic practices of image-making, performance, writing and sound – both within and outside the art market – reflect on, simulate, initiate and break apart sociality and political consciousness, particularly after the advent of colonial modernity. Through his work as a scholar, writer, and curator, he explores the at once harmonious and dissonant relationships between psychoanalysis and social organization, desire and labor, and settler-colonial and imperial economies, as well as their counterforms of political rebellion. He has recently served as part of the selection committee at the Biennale of Moving Images in Geneva (BIM’26) and published with Bilna’es An Echo in Search of its Shadow: Aesthetics of the Repressed (2024), with new artworks by Haitham Haddad. His curatorial projects and scholarship have been presented and featured in various museums, universities and cultural institutions, among which are the Sharjah Biennial 16 (2025), the Vera List Center at The New School (2024), The Mosaic Rooms (2023), the James Gallery at the CUNY Graduate Center (2023), MoMA PS1 (2022), the Berlin Biennale 12 (2022) and Mophradat (2022–2024). He is currently Associate Curator at the Center for Human Rights & the Arts, Bard College.
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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
MACBA Thirty
We celebrate Year Thirty of an infinite MACBA that projects the future as a space for revision and possibility: of taking up what was left unfinished, updating what needs it and projecting anew everything that can still be transformed.
exhibition
From 13 February to 28 September 2026
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom
