The work

THE REVOLT – A Study on the Zanj Rebellion (869–883 AD)

has been selected by the Art Basel Selection Committee, together with Artistic Director Wael Shawky

Living in diaspora has shaped my relationship to memory, place, and belonging. My work explores
what persists from the past, the turbulence of displacement, and the act of reorienting oneself
within new environments.
Working across video, sculpture, painting, and installation, I examine—through both humor and
tragedy—how historical narratives are constructed, rewritten, and lived. In doing so, I aim to resist
the erasure of memory while using my experience of physical displacement as a critical lens
through which to question dominant histories and modes of belonging.

On (2023) – Part of King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture – Ithra collection – Art Prize winner
Galerie Tanit is proud to present THE REVOLT, a small-scale presentation of a larger ongoing
multidisciplinary project by Helsinki-based Iraqi-Finnish artist Adel Abidin. This focused selection
revisits the Zanj Rebellion (869–883 CE) — a fourteen-year uprising and one of the earliest and most
complex revolts in early Islamic history, carried out by enslaved Southeast Africans in southern Iraq.
Driven by his longstanding curiosity to draw connections between contemporary and historical
events, Abidin turns his attention to the earliest and most complex uprisings of enslaved Africans: the
Zanj Rebellion. Beginning in Basra, southern Iraq, in 869 CE, the Zanj—Bantu people forcibly taken
from the East African coast—were enslaved and compelled to drain salt marshes and mine salt
under brutal conditions. The violence of this system, and the resistance it provoked, offers a critical
lens for understanding the global structures of labor exploitation and displacement that persist
today.

THE REVOLT seeks to restore the voices of the Zanj through forms that merge material, memory, and
imagination. It underscores the centrality of oral storytelling in both Arab and African cultures,
recognizing how history is shaped by those who record it, and how much is obscured when only the
victors’ narratives endure. Across its chapters, the project inviting audiences to confront the historical
foundations of present-day inequalities and to reconsider what archives, testimony, and
remembrance can mean.

The Zanj Rebellion (869–883 CE) stands as one of the longest and most consequential uprisings
against systemic oppression in early Islamic history. Centered in the marshlands of southern Iraq, the
revolt spanned fourteen years and was driven by the enslaved Bantu peoples’ pursuit of dignity,
justice, and freedom amid extreme labor and dehumanization under the Abbasid Caliphate. Their
struggle not only challenged the economic and social structures of the time, but also left a lasting
imprint on the history of resistance in the medieval Islamic world.