Bassam Issa Al-Sabah

A Scream Floats Among the Flowers – September to October 2023

This exhibition charts Bassam Issa Al-Sabah’s film work over the last eight years. Al-Sabah utilises a hyper-artificial and glitched aesthetic which is at times seductive but often perplexing and unnerving. He creates unique worlds of delicate storytelling filled with visual and conceptual juxtapositions. Combining fantasy erotica and body horror, Bassam’s films celebrate the hero’s growth and transformation in all its literalness, as bodies sprout and blend into their surroundings, among writhing flowers and tentacular creatures.

Bassam Issa Al-Sabah (IRE) works across digital animation, painting, sculpture, and textiles. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at The DHG(2022) Solstice Arts Centre (2019), the LAB (2018) and with the Glucksman as an offsite installation (2021). Group exhibitions include Golden Thread Gallery (2020), the Dock (2021), Queer Embodiment and Social Fabric at IMMA (2021-2022) and Futures at the RHA (2018). His work has also been shown internationally, including solo exhibitions at Gasworks (London, 2021) and the De La Warr Pavillion (UK, 2022), and group exhibitions and screenings at Transmediale (Berlin, 2021), EX-IS (South Korea, 2021), Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2021) and the Barbican (London, 2022). His work is part of IMMA, the Arts Council and Dun Laoighaire Rathdown County Council collections. In 2021 he received the Golden Fleece Award, and in 2023 he was awarded a distinction in new animation art by Prix Ars electronica. He is currently a studio member at Temple Bar Gallery+Studios.

Screens 1 & 2 – It’s Dangerous To Go Alone & I am Error

Two CGI film featuring ever-changing cinematic sequences from an imaginary video game which follows the ambiguous “hero” undergoing numerous metamorphoses. Combining fantasy, erotica and body horror, the film unravels and challenges the amped-up constructed masculinity that video game avatars embody as well as the associated idealistic connotations of progress, growth and transformation. Here external worlds merge with internal ones, the body’s selfhood untangles from surface and emotions flood in technicolour form.

Screen 3 – A Paradise Out of A Common Field

A short animated film by Jennifer Mehigan and Bassam Issa Al-Sabah that explores the iconography of the zombie. The origin of the zombie in general cultural history is relatively unknown, but within the confines of this film, she emerges from a lush garden and is submerged into the ocean. Playing with dream worlds that consist of feral horses and writhing flowers, horizons and image planes unfold to disorient viewers, while the audio transports you through an interpretation of the history of the Irish graveyard and its relationship to trauma.

Screen 4 – Dissolving Beyond The Worm Moon

The film was produced in relation to war, unrealized childhood fantasies and representation of war and violence within globalized media. The film imagines the traumatised body as a functioning time machine where gaps between timelines and anomalies cause the present-day body to disappear and is replaced by the body’s memory of past trauma. The film weaves a narrative from mental time travel, episodic future thinking (a projection of the self into the future to pre-experience an event) and PTSD.

Screen 5 – Wandering, Wandering with a Sun on my Back

an existential film, contrasting with the hyper concentrated computer-generated visuals. We are presented with a shimmering human representation within dwellings that cannot be escaped. These dwellings will be set in landscapes that oscillate between dystopian and utopian scenery. Objects pulsate, morph and melt into each other producing an amorphous representation of pain and distress.

Screen 6 – Fenced within the silent cold walls

The CGI film featuring a recreation of my former home in Iraq, which my family cannot return to. As the film moves through the house, digital images begin to escape from the forgotten TV and computer screens and materialise into living forms. These forces surge out in utter destruction, invading the domestic realm without restraint. We then hear a narration in Arabic from my grandmother where she describes the burning of sentimental objects in the home before fleeing, and digital fabrications of these objects appear before disintegrating.