At a time when galleries and museums are cautious of commenting on the politics of Israel and Palestine for fear of reputational damage, Nottingham Contemporary are exhibiting Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom. Created by a collaborative artist duo of Palestinian descent, Abbas and Abou-Rahme foreground the incarceration experiences of Palestinian ex-detainees in Israeli prisons.
The exhibition does not explore which side is right or wrong, nor assign responsibility in a didactic way. Instead, through an installation combining multiple first-hand accounts in film, text and imagery, Abbas and Abou-Rahme highlight strategies of creative and non-violent resistance to Israel’s ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories. Threaded throughout is the artists’ exploration of the materiality of sound and its possibilities as an activating medium.
To see and feel where resistance thrives, Abbas and Abou-Rahme take us quite literally into the dark, providing just enough light to see the artwork. This sensory deprivation amplifies the dissonant sound that hangs in the air. My eyes eventually adjust to see gauzy, image-printed banners suspended from the ceiling, slices of metal walls standing solidly resolute with prints and photographs magnetically attached, and a large projection in one corner of the room, all bathed in aubergine-purple glow. The images on the fabrics, prints and photographs are repeated around the room. Black and white drawings by Abou-Rahme’s father feature faceless floating figures and the impression of a person flying through the air while being attacked by planes. They are ghostly, expressionistic figures, traumatised by warfare. The photographs on the walls also appear printed on the suspended textiles, fuzzy and with their colours inverted: white and yellow featureless figures or a silhouetted flower against dark backgrounds. A purposeful sense of obscurity pervades the imagery. The fabric is placed almost too high to see clearly and the photography is naturally vague.
I pass between the metal walls and catch sight of word-processed screenshots tacked on the other side. They are documents, letters and poems written in English and Arabic. The authors are mostly anonymous: a means of protecting their identities without censoring their voices. Ideas from the imagery surface in the covert missives. A poem refers to ‘being the negative’ as a way of continuing to thrive while seemingly buried (a conceptual and representational motif that reappears throughout the exhibition). One account, written by Abou-Rahme, tells of how her father’s resistance was core to his being. She recalls how her father, a baby at the time of the 1948 Nakba, survived with the help of other Palestinian women who breast-fed him when his mother could no longer produce milk. An act of solidarity and resistance that has echoed down the generations, ‘These are the deadly repetitions that make their home in us’. Each piece of writing is a precious meeting in the shadows. There is weight in their directness, as if I’ve been told a secret that I must now also carry.
A video projection beams through a cluster of wafting fabric lengths, as well as slices of concrete and metal sheets which together form the projection surface. Each slice of material presents the image differently: grainy on concrete, diffused on textile and red-tinged on metal. Fragments of images are spliced and exaggerated. In what should be a man’s profile we only see his ear. Central in the arrangement and set back is a dark, rusted steel panel where the image always appears inverted, like a large-scale film negative. It holds the installation together but is easily overlooked for its lack of visual communication–though that is exactly the point, it is hiding in plain sight. The visual metaphor again suggests that being in the shadows is key to resistance.
Electronic hums and discordant percussion emanate from the cavernous adjoining gallery where a three screen multi-channel film runs on a loop. The film is a non-linear interweaving of recollections, poems and short texts from Palestinian ex-detainees, named only using their initials. It opens with a car driving along a dark road against the border wall and a brisk radio voiceover updates listeners on which checkpoints are open or closed. It establishes that Palestinian lives are defined by externally imposed and tightly controlled physical boundaries, then gives way to accounts of small, creative freedoms as acts of resistance. A woman sings a song she learned in prison–the lyrics speak of wishing the prison as a ruin–despite suffering dehumanising treatment for singing it while imprisoned, she describes how it brought laughter to her and her fellow inmates. A man tells of how, to preserve his mind during interrogations, he would memorise the faces he hallucinated and would draw them afterwards.
Visual juxtapositions of the ex-prisoners exploring shady bramble or looking out over endless vistas whilst talking about their confinement is jarring. The contrast opens space for understanding the psychological colonisation that they strive to resist. Intimate moments of connection with the land are captured in close-up: a young woman gently runs her fingers in a shallow pool of water, another woman caresses a rocky hill. These are acts of care and connection. Resistance is not just survival, it is love.
Sound is pivotal to experiencing the film: in one dramatic moment, the sound becomes aggressive, building and crashing repeatedly, the overwhelming bass painfully distorted. Set against a negatively-coloured visual of a blue prison boundary beneath a brilliant orange sky, Samih al-Qasim’s poem Enemy of the Sun is plastered in capitalised letters across the screen. Overlaid with an irregular pounding drum, it creates an ominous atmosphere. As the sound vibrates through my body, it becomes an urgent call to action. I feel a sudden sense to move, to go and do something, anything. It feels devastatingly disorienting, subconscious and irrepressible. The air is so thick with sound that it presses me to the concrete stool. I need to move, but I can’t. This is what Abbas and Abou-Rahme impart: the existential will to be free within an oppressive space that will not allow it. The soundscape brings this home so potently that it creates an emotional viewing of the rest of the exhibition. Each image, each piece of writing and each poem becomes a powerful statement of defiance and survival. It is the determination behind these creations that resonates most for me. While I revisit the images, the sound continues to provoke an urgent sense of action, as if resistance is a call from deep within.
Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom conveys the complex reality of living in a land defined by occupation and belonging. An experience that, on the whole, British audiences might not immediately understand or easily relate to. By staging an immersive, multi-media encounter that communicates subjugation and defiance so profoundly, Abbas and Abou-Rahme offer understanding without pity. The individuals that contributed to the exhibition have agency and resilience that maintains a sense of self and preserves a connection to the land that they belong to. We see that resistance lives within everyday, innocuous moments of self-expression: singing, drawing and simply enjoying the landscape.
Gathering these individual acts of autonomy reveals a community who, though marginalised by their oppression and unidentified to preserve their safety, want their stories to be heard and recorded for posterity. Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom offers them self-expression without the algorithmic limitations of social media, or the mediations of journalists. That their experiences are presented in a gallery setting also suggests that resistance is itself an art form. An essential and determined practice that is bolstered by personal recollections, creative expression and love.
Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom is on at Nottingham Contemporary, 27 September 2025 – 11 January 2026.
Amrit Doll is a writer based in Leicester.
This review is supported by Nottingham Contemporary
Published 10.12.2025 by Rachel Graves in Reviews
1,355 words
