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Bassam Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan

Visual Arts

2021- 2022
Still from I WILL STAND IN THE LIGHT 1
View Gallery

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).

For The Dock Commission Bassam Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan will produce a small film work; "I will stand in the light, but not this light". The next chapter is a 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, the film will weave alien and contaminated worlds to explore ideas around comfort and care in the face of climate change.

"I will stand in the light, but not this light"
is a single-channel video by Bassam Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan that explores themes of divine retribution, queendom, and climate change through the lens of Catholic iconography, constellations, and Fallopia Japonica (Japanese knotweed).

The status of the plant across Ireland and the United Kingdom is considered extremely invasive due to its successful reproductive capabilities, with most of the plants that reside here coming from one singular Mother plant in Japan, making it the largest female in the world in terms of biomass.

The video-game style monologue calls on the 'archaic mother' trope in horror and positions the cultivated offspring plants and other similar bodies as revenge seekers, declaring war and placing curses on the structures and species that have led us to our current stage of climate devastation.

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.

A special film screening of "I will stand in the light, but not this light" took place in The Dock performance space from August 15th to 20th.

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