Bassam Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan

Visual Arts

2021

About the Artist(s)

Bassam Al-Sabah lives and works in Belfast and Dublin. He completed a BA in Visual Art Practice from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology in 2016, and was awarded the RHA Graduate Studio Award (2016-2017) and the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Graduate Residency Award (2018-2019). Recent solo exhibitions include I AM ERROR, Gasworks, London (2021) 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 A Fiction Close To Reality, Irish Museum Of Modern Art, Dublin, Pallas Periodical Review, Pallas Projects, Dublin; Futures, Series 3, Episode 2, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, and Syntonic State, Tulca 18, Galway.

Jennifer Mehigan is an artist and writer based in Belfast. Her current research focuses on suppressed Irish lesbian historical figures and their graves as horticultural sites, uncovering queer strategies for surviving climate and kinship crises. Recent exhibitions include On Refusal, transmediale, Berlin (2021); and Creamatorium, PS², Belfast (2020).

Bassam Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan will use the Dock Commission to produce a small film work. The next chapter in the collaborative film project between them, approaching digital environments, necropastoral spaces and their respective avatars. Considering the 3D-environment as a site of the mutated, atypical, and inhuman and film will weave alien and contaminated worlds to explore ideas around comfort and care in the face of climate change.

A collaborative film by Bassam Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan. “A Paradise Out of A Common Field”, originally commissioned by RTE for the Illuminations Gallery.