Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom

Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom (2025-2026) is an immersive multimedia installation that takes as its point of departure the long history of Palestinian dispossession and incarceration from the Nakba of 1948 to the present.  It draws on Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s research into the experiences of imprisoned Palestinians, and how their spirits and political struggle have endured under the harsh conditions of incarceration. Through first-hand recordings and testimonies gathered across the occupied West Bank, the installation weaves together the voices of former detainees with poems and texts by scholars and revolutionary thinkers—some of whom have themselves been imprisoned —as well as by the artists, reflecting on confinement, resilience and justice under regimes of occupation and oppression.

These voices form a polyphonic, non-linear narrative that speaks not only to the physical and psychological hardships of imprisonment, but also to moments of tenderness, joy and creative resistance. Poetry and song emerge as vital practices through which prisoners reclaim agency, becoming critical modes of survival that sustain inner freedom even under conditions designed to extinguish it.

In the film, a woman recalls singing a song she learned in prison, its lyrics wishing the prison into ruin. She describes how, despite being punished with solitary confinement for singing, it was worth the joy and laughter it brought to her and her fellow inmates. Another prisoner recounts singing as a means of communication with others.

It is a multi-element installation, with photographic panels and transparent fabrics suspended from the ceiling, projections on different supports, images that resist containment, overflowing their frames and spilling across screens, panels and fabric scrolls; all linked to the notions of overflow and seepage. An idea closely related to these two concepts is that of the “negative," which recurs throughout the work and the artists’ wider practice and thinking. To exist in the negative is to occupy a space of denial, erasure and constraint—yet it is from within this space of lack that alternative forms of life and imagination emerge.