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https://www.brown.edu/campus-life/arts/bell-gallery/

David Winton Bell Gallery, 64 College Street, Providence, RI (2026)

01/31/2026

The Bell / Brown Arts Institute premieres the newest project from internationally-renowned sound, video, and installation artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Featuring interviews with former political prisoners made on location in Palestine, “Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom” celebrates poetry, music, and art as forms of expressing individual and collective survivance within systems of incarceration across time and space.

Using strategies of opacity and fragmentation, Abbas and Abou-Rahme incorporate concrete, fabric, and weathered steel—carceral architecture—as the projection surfaces of this sound and video installation to build, in the artists’ words, “a vast counter-archive to document Palestinian life.” “Enemy of the Sun” (1970), by acclaimed Palestinian poet Samih Al-Qasim, foregrounds the installation; this poem was mis-attributed to Black Panther George Jackson and memorialized in the Black Panther newspaper following his 1971 murder in San Quentin prison. Found handwritten in Jackson’s cell, the poem evokes the long relationship between Black political prisoners in the United States and Palestinian political prisoners.

01/31/2026

“Prisoners of Love” is commissioned by The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, Brown University in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, United Kingdom); Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, The Netherlands); and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona / MACBA (Barcelona, Spain). Kate Kraczon and Thea Quiray Tagle are the co-curators of this project at The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, an extension of the artists’ ongoing relationship with Kraczon, who produced their first US exhibition and catalog in 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Moments of exchange between Abou-Rahme and Abbas with Brown’s community have been underway since 2020, with Kraczon connecting them to Nadje Al-Ali, Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), where they were the opening speakers in a series of talks, events, and exhibitions in 2022 jointly organized by CMES and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University on the topics of art, gender and body politics in the Middle East and its diasporas. Abou-Rahme and Abbas have been working with curators at Brown’s John Hay Library since 2023, conducting research in the university’s archival project “Voices of Mass Incarceration in the United States” among other international archival sources. In Spring 2025, Quiray Tagle and the artists developed and taught a graduate and undergraduate research-based course, co-taught with Kraczon, that furthered the artists’ research towards The Bell presentation while enabling students’ own research into family archives, community-based archives, and other untold histories of mass incarceration.

01/31/2026

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Basel Abbas (b. Nicosia, Cyprus, 1983; New York and Ramallah) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b. Boston, USA, 1983; New York and Ramallah) work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Across their works they probe a contemporary landscape marked by seemingly-perpetual crisis and an endless ‘present’, one that is shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. They have been developing a body of work that questions this suspension of the present and searches for ways in which an altogether different imaginary and language can emerge that is not bound within colonial/capitalist narrative and discourse. In their projects, they find themselves excavating, activating and inventing incidental narratives, figures, gestures and sites as material for re-imagining the possibilities of the present. Often reflecting on ideas of non-linearity in the form of returns, amnesia, and deja vu, and in the process unfolding the slippages between actuality and projection (fiction, myth, wish), what is and what could be. Largely their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, objects and recasting them into altogether new ‘scripts’. The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multimedia installations and live sound/image performances.

CREDITS:
“Prisoners of Love” is commissioned by The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, Brown University in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, United Kingdom); Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, The Netherlands); and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona / MACBA (Barcelona, Spain).

The project is made possible at Brown through generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support has been provided by the Center for Middle East Studies.

01/30/2026

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Basel Abbas (b. Nicosia, Cyprus, 1983; New York and Ramallah) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b. Boston, USA, 1983; New York and Ramallah) work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Across their works they probe a contemporary landscape marked by seemingly-perpetual crisis and an endless ‘present’, one that is shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. They have been developing a body of work that questions this suspension of the present and searches for ways in which an altogether different imaginary and language can emerge that is not bound within colonial/capitalist narrative and discourse. In their projects, they find themselves excavating, activating and inventing incidental narratives, figures, gestures and sites as material for re-imagining the possibilities of the present. Often reflecting on ideas of non-linearity in the form of returns, amnesia, and deja vu, and in the process unfolding the slippages between actuality and projection (fiction, myth, wish), what is and what could be. Largely their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, objects and recasting them into altogether new ‘scripts’. The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multimedia installations and live sound/image performances.

CREDITS:
“Prisoners of Love” is commissioned by The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, Brown University in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, United Kingdom); Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, The Netherlands); and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona / MACBA (Barcelona, Spain).

04/11/2024

Save the Date for next Thursday, April 18!

FEM / ART / TECH: CONVERSATIONS ON FEMINIST NEW MEDIA AND PERFORMANCE ART

THURSDAY, APRIL 18, 4:30-8PM
Fishman Studio (4S), Granoff Center for the Creative Arts
154 Angell Street, Providence, RI

Occasioned by the survey exhibition Barbara T. Smith: Proof, now on view at The Bell, this one-night gathering features conversations with feminist contemporary artists Paula Gaetano Adi and Amber Hawk Swanson, whose dynamic experiments with technology, performance, and materiality labor to shift our understanding of bodies, s*xualities, and society. Extending but not duplicating the concerns of artist Barbara T. Smith, these artists push the boundaries between self and others, and between humans and machines.

This event is free and open to all! For more information, visit The Bell's website: brown.edu/bellgallery

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Barbara T. Smith: Proof is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and guest curated by Jenelle Porter with support from Amanda Sroka, Senior Curator, and Caroline Ellen Liou, Curatorial Assistant. The presentation at the Brown Arts Institute / The David Winton Bell Gallery, part of the Perelman Arts District at Brown University, is organized by Thea Quiray Tagle, Associate Curator.

Image credit: Amber Hawk Swanson, “Shower Curtain Kiss” from the Amber Doll Project (2007, revisited for installation 2012 and 2018), life-sized RealDoll made in artist’s likeness, archival pigment print. Photo courtesy of the artist.

02/21/2023

When navigating the Bell installation of "Elisabeth Subrin: The Listening Takes," viewers find themselves reflected within the camera's frame. Subrin has installed a grid of mirrors on the back of each projection wall, providing moments of fracture between the screen and gallery. Decreasingly distressed to evoke the passage of time, the weathered glass dissolves past and present, inviting Schneider's language into contemporary conversations around s*xual misconduct in the workplace. The Listening Takes shifts Subrin's lens-based practice more deeply into sculptural and sound installation, physically reflecting her use of cross-historical and psychological repetition in film and further complicating notions of biography, portraiture, and the legacy of trauma and resilience.

Video description: Visitors in the Bell Gallery navigate the freestanding projection walls that have a grid of aged mirrors installed on the back.

02/16/2023

Thank you to everyone who joined us last Thursday to celebrate the openings of "Elisabeth Subrin: The Listening Takes" and "Superimposed." We are now open daily 11-5 and Thursdays 11-8, and are always free to the public!

Image description: a crowd of people gather in the List Art Center lobby for the opening of the Bell's spring shows.

02/09/2023

Also opening tonight! "Superimposed" curated by Bell / BAI Curatorial Fellow Susana Turbay Botero.

Sol LeWitt’s "Wall Drawing #436: Asymmetrical pyramid with color ink washes superimposed," currently installed on loan from the LeWitt Foundation at Brown University’s Health and Wellness Center as part of the Public Art program, features five asymmetrical triangles resembling the unfolded faces of a pentagonal pyramid. LeWitt employed a minimalist style in his drawings, convinced that the value of art lies in the quality of the idea rather than its physical form.

Featuring a combination of prints, collage, and painting by Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, and Charmion Von Wiegand drawn from the Bell Gallery Collection, the objects on display echo an amalgam of the styles and visual forms entwined in the work of LeWitt and his peers. Imbued with a sense of dynamism, these two-dimensional compositions contest the stillness of the walls, creating tension between the works and viewers traversing List Lobby.

02/07/2023

Opening Thursday night! Free and open to the public!⁠
⁠
5pm Gallery opens⁠
6pm Artist talk with Elisabeth Subrin⁠
7-8pm Reception⁠
⁠
Join award-winning artist and filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin for a conversation on her César nominated film portrait of subversive actress Maria Schneider (1952–2011) and the immersive sound, video, and sculptural installation, "The Listening Takes," debuting at the Bell Gallery. A reception will follow.⁠
⁠
Collaborating with the women who portray Maria (internationally acclaimed actress Manal Issa, and Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval, who are celebrated directors and actresses), "The Listening Takes" focuses on Schneider’s refusal within a 1983 interview to discuss her controversial lead role opposite Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci’s "Last Tango in Paris" (1972) and the non-consensual s*x scene that she was subjected to on the set. As she articulates her perspective as a woman within the film industry, Schneider reveals a devastating prescience about the ways women are defined within and beyond cinema. Filmed for both black box theater and multi-channel gallery presentations, Subrin’s project untethers Schneider from "Tango" and allows the nuances of Maria’s interview to be reimagined within three extraordinary performances, each generously listening, and holding space, for one another.

David Winton Bell Gallery

01/31/2026

01/31/2026

01/31/2026

01/30/2026

04/11/2024

02/21/2023

02/16/2023

02/09/2023

02/07/2023

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Monday	11am - 5pm
Tuesday	11am - 5pm
Wednesday	11am - 5pm
Thursday	11am - 8pm
Friday	11am - 5pm
Saturday	11am - 5pm
Sunday	11am - 5pm