The digitally recreated blueprint has been rendered from memory (in collaboration with his architect sister), and leads us back to Bassam’s distant re-imagined childhood: a ghost house that appears as a mirage over a computer-generated skyline. As the film moves inside the house, we are led through eerily unoccupied rooms, until slowly each space fills with various dubious, glitchy, liquid-like forms that emerge and flow out of the radio and the TV screen, liberally overwhelming and invading the spaces we see.

As we ‘escape’ from the interior of the house to its exterior, a female voice emerges and introduces itself as the artist’s grandmother who tells us the story of her family’s departure from Iraq leaving her behind with only her children’s personal belongings and photographs as memories. As she recounts the act of burning the photographs that reminded her of the past, colourful splinters emerge from the fire. As if this performance of wiping out the past is her only option, she tells us: “I wanted to forget the past, deny all that I have been through. I wanted to erase my loneliness.”

In the re-imagining and re-modelling of Bassam’s childhood home, and the re-telling of his grandmother’s pain the question of how we, individually and collectively, deal with trauma, loss and displacement in the past and present, emerges.

Bassam Al-Sabah Fenced within the silent cold walls 2018 HD film, CGI Duration: 12 minutes 29 seconds

Bassam Al-Sabah works across digital animation, painting, sculpture and textiles to convey intricate visions of war, resistance and perseverance. Themes such as displacement, nostalgia and personal mythology are explored through reference to Japanese anime cartoons, which were dubbed into Arabic and broadcast throughout the Middle East from the 1980s to today.Many of these TV programmes featured imagery of revolution, war and exile, gaining a heightened political meaning within his practice. As successive generations of Arabs have grown up with these anime series, Bassam’s work deals with a feeling of collective nostalgia, an amalgamation of narratives in which fact and fiction, historical trauma and queer possibility intersect.

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 Dissolving Beyond The Worm Moon, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan (2019); Illusions of Love Dyed by Sunset, The LAB, Dublin (2018); and The dust carried me into the watchful summer, Eight Gallery, Dublin (2017). 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 Acadamy, Dublin, and Syntonic State, Tulca 18, Galway.