By incorporating fictional elements into their multi-media projects, Palestinian collaborative duo Abbas and Abou-Rahme essentially tell stories in installation form. But with this, their biggest UK show to date, you might want to give the press release a once-over first. The premise runs like this: a Neolithic mask dug up in the West Bank has been ‘hacked’ and 3D-printed, and the replicas are circulated around the Middle Eastern territory.
The creepy, unseeing black mask runs as a motif throughout the show. In the first room, we find them displayed on metal poles, alongside printouts of Wikipedia pages pinned to corkboards and tables covered in dried plant specimens. It would all look the results of a research project, if it weren’t so tastefully, artfully arranged. Think of the visual merchandising in a store like Urban Outfitters.
The video installations in the second and third spaces pack more of a punch. Footage of youngsters wandering through a ruined village are overset with portentous phrases in English and Arabic: ‘WE CIRCLE SILENTLY’; ‘THE WORDS ARE PURPOSES’. Upturned tools like pliers and hammers have their shadows cast by the projectors; their jagged silhouettes hint at a violence never explicitly spelt out in the videos.
Atmospheric touches like this are inventive, but they’re hard to square against all the pseudo-investigative stuff, which feels a bit dry and trainspotterish by comparison. Abbas and Abou-Rahme have some cool points to make, about mask-wearing as a form of protest (à la Occupy movement); about the political potential of new technology. Such ideas just need a bit of – for want of a better word – excavation.