Fenced within the silent cold walls features a recreation of the artist’s former home in Iraq, to which his family are unable to return. As the camera moves through the derelict house, digital images begin to escape from a forgotten TV and computer screens, and materialise into living forms. These forces surge out in utter destruction, invading the domestic realm. A voice introduces itself as Al-Sabah’s grandmother who describes the burning of sentimental objects in the home before fleeing, leaving everything behind but her photographs. Reflecting on this childhood memory as an adult, Al-Sabah weaves imagery pulled from cartoons with paintings of his family portraits, deconstructing the links between fantasy and reality, the hero and the everyday, and make-believe and fact.
Fenced within the silent cold walls, 2018, film, 12‘29“
Familiar Scenes That Refuse To Stay, 2019
dreams and moods that subside in a few weeks, 2019
With the support of Culture Ireland.
Bassam Al-Sabah - Across video, painting, sculpture, and textiles, Bassam Al-Sabah’s work aims to convey visions of war, resistance, and exile. His artwork projects political meaning on to Arabic-dubbed anime cartoons, broadcast across the Middle East since the 1980s. Concerned with how memories of the past are continually revised to meet the present, the reworked animations make space for historical trauma and queer possibility to intersect.
