Palestinian Artists at Copenhagen Glyptotek

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Palestinian Artists at Copenhagen Glyptotek
In a period when Palestinians are being crushed by the oppressive Israeli war machine and the strong anti-Arab propaganda campaign, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme remind us that Palestinians continue to make art.

In one of the vaulted rooms of Copenhagen's Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, several gleaming reproductions of archaeological artefacts hang from the ceiling. Suspended in the air, the shiny black figurines seem to engage in a slow but almost ecstatic dance, casting shadows on the heliotrope-tinted images of Palestinian landscapes that adorn the walls. One of the reproductions, in particular, catches the eye. It is of a headless woman, with her arms slightly disproportionately bent and half bent. She wears a necklace and a girdle, both represented by straight furrows. The original idol is housed behind glass two rooms away, in another of the galleries dedicated to prehistoric art from the Near East and Cyprus. Very little is known about it, except that it is a female terracotta figure from Syria dating to the late Bronze Age. It did not enter the museum’s collection until 1987 – an interesting date considering that an international convention was adopted as early as 1970 to prohibit and prevent the illicit import, export and transfer of cultural property.
Could it have been looted from Syria? How many times did it change hands? When did its journey of displacement begin? The idol – and its 3D-printed reproduction – resemble two of the brown clay anthropomorphic figurines unearthed almost a decade later, sometime between 1994 and 2010, at the archaeological site of Umm El-Marra in Syria, east of present-day Aleppo. That excavation, led by Near Eastern archaeologist Glenn Schwartz, recovered more than two hundred Bronze Age clay figurines and fragments, showing the transition from hand-modeling to casting between the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. In 2011, the excavation was suspended indefinitely after civil war made archaeological work in Syria impossible. The idol replica is one of the protagonists of It is easy to forget why I came among so many who have always lived here (2024), an installation by the Palestinian duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Located in the Glyptotek, the work is part of a large exhibition that brings together a dozen installations created by the duo over several years. Titled The song is the call, and the earth calls, the entire show is a collaboration between the museum and Copenhagen Contemporary, a young art institution on the outskirts of the Danish capital. For the exhibition, several ancient idols and figurines from Anatolia and the Levant, from the museum’s collection, were reproduced using 3D printing, freeing them from traditional museography and placing them in new, porous narratives that reach back into the past but also move forward into indefinite times, into fluid contemporaneities. These assemblages of different elements, preserved from the past, resurrected in the present, mixed with leaks from the future, create a sense of parallel timelines and coexisting propensities. The idols on display in the museum show how paradoxical archaeological classifications are: Artifacts of the same classification can often be separated by thousands of years and have almost no continuity between them. Neolithic mother goddesses, idols of the Kusura, Beycesultan, Troy or Caykenari type, probably from southwestern Anatolia, and early Iron Age terracottas from Syria, all inhabit together that imaginary space called prehistory, only on the basis of certain vague typological features that they share, just as the Arab world or the Near East is a continuous entity in the contemporary imagination.

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