Curated images, polished narratives, and carefully packaged experiences saturate our everyday lives. We are sold fantasies as lifestyles to aspire to, which shape our desires and how we see ourselves and the world. In digital spaces that promise connection and freedom, we often become flattened to profiles that reflect how we want to be seen. Our appearance to others becomes determined by algorithms and the systems behind them.
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah works across digital animation, painting, sculpture, and textiles to create dreamlike environments that offer visions of resistance, transformation and queer possibility. At the centre of his work is an interest in how digital culture influences our response to trauma, displacement and loss. His imagined worlds offer room to reconsider personal and collective existences - places where fantasy becomes both a shelter and a site of reckoning. In this new immersive work, Bassam explores the dreamlike quality of digital media, from its glossy surface to its seductive imagery. Do these idealised images reflect our desires, or have our identities been moulded to desire the impossible?
THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT! reflects on the patterns and cycles that shape our experience of the world. Different systems—whether political, digital, or architectural—determine how we perceive and interact with the world. In the gallery, sculptures appear as though smashed into each other. Artefacts with their own history and identity collide, creating new objects that offer reflections of this pressure and force. A new film work follows a cast of fantastical characters as they explore the tension between following, resisting, and choosing their own paths. The work questions whether a utopia can ever be neutral: whose future are we imagining when we build idealised digital spaces? Drawing from video game mechanics and digital aesthetics, Bassam builds environments that feel immersive but tightly controlled—worlds we can explore, but not quite alter. Through this lens, he explores how hidden ideas and beliefs can seep into worldbuilding: from dangerous ideologies to the fake, polished lifestyles sold through social media. The installation and sculptures create a space that feels like it is shifting and collapsing around us, pulling us in.
Rather than offering answers or closure, THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT! creates space for reflection. It asks us to look again at the world we live in, and the future we hope for. In a time marked by collapse and contradiction, the imagined world becomes a place to face hard truths and rethink what is possible - where fantasy becomes a tool for survival, not escape.
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah works across digital animation, painting, sculpture and textiles creating visions of resistance, transformation and queer possibility. He completed a BA in Visual Art Practice from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology in 2016.
Recent solo exhibitions include: you are in heaven but suddenly everything begins to burn, Kunstverein Aughrim (2024) Uncensored Lilac, Transmediale, Silent Green (2024) ITS DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS, The Douglas Hyde Gallery (2022) I AM ERROR, Gasworks, London (2021), and De La Warr Pavilion, Sussex (2022); Dissolving Beyond The Worm Moon, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan (2019); and Illusions of Love Dyed by Sunset, The LAB, Dublin (2018).
Recent group exhibitions include Queer Embodiment and Social Fabric at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2021-2022), The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon (2021) and Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2020). Recent screenings include the Barbican, London (2022), Transmediale, Berlin (2021), EX-IS, South Korea (2021) and Jeu de Paume, Paris (2021).
His work is part of collections in IMMA, the Arts Council of Ireland and Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council. In 2023 he received an award of distinction in New Animation Art from Prix Ars Electronica and In 2021 he received the Golden Fleece Award.
He is currently a studio member at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Al-Sabah lives and works in Dublin.
