“The Incidental Insurgents: The Part about the Bandits consists of an intricate network of histories, geographies and portrayals. Rather than narrating a story, however, the materials serve as props from which Abbas and Abou-Rahme set out to elucidate how – like the bandits before them – they find themselves ‘inhabiting a moment of full radical potential and disillusionment, in continual search for a language for the moment’. In many ways, the project responds to the sense of geo-political urgency around them. However, it also deliberately chooses playfulness as a form of creative freedom and as a tool to discover a language and an aesthetic for the political in their practice. A vector which is not locked into the bleak nobility of fatalism or the burden of national representation but which believes, in the artists’ own words, in the political’s need to ‘produce daily life’. With its heady mix of adventure and detective flair, the work of Abbas and Abou-Rahme liquidates the easy categorization of engaged artistic practice related to the Middle East. Their footsteps carry the distant echo of Michel Foucault’s words: ‘Do not think you have to be sad in order to be militant.’”