The title piece of IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS is an ambitious 30-minute-long CGI film featuring ever-changing cinematic sequences from an imaginary video game which follows the ambiguous “hero” undergoing numerous metamorphoses. Combining fantasy, erotica and body horror, the film unravels and challenges the amped-up constructed masculinity that video game avatars embody as well as the associated idealistic connotations of progress, growth and transformation. Here external worlds merge with internal ones, the body’s selfhood untangles from surface and emotions flood in technicolour form.

Within the gallery a previous film work, I AM ERROR (2021) charts the same hero’s altering form through different worlds and encounters, but here it is fractured, broken into multiple segments or echoes, playing out in repetition on monitors on the gallery floor. The titles of both of these film works are taken from the popular video game The Legends of Zelda, an action-adventure format which follows a courageous young man, Link, and the magical Princess Zelda, fighting to save a magical land in a vividly realised world. Al-Sabah’s titles IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS and I AM ERROR disentangle assumptions and longstanding narratives, bringing forth fluidity and queer possibility.

The visual flooding that occurs in both films is echoed in a series of 3D-rendered sculptures presented throughout the gallery populating this dreamscape. Larger-than-life iridescent flies sit on the ground, giant Styrofoam bodily parts lie alongside amorphous semi-representational shapes and sprouting and/or perishing flowers. The sculptures are familiar, yet deliberately glitched and unreal, anchoring the dreamscape to the space and reality via their familiarity, but inducing, at the same time, a sense of disembodiment due to their artificiality and “imperfections”.

Al-Sabah’s hyper-synthetic glitched aesthetic is at times seductive but often disconcerting and eerie, creating unique worlds of subtle storytelling full of visual and conceptual juxtapositions. Across the film and sculptures, the viewer experiences scenes of destruction and decay against scenes of resilience and rebirth. These juxtapositions offer Al-Sabah a platform to explore themes of identity, social binaries and norms. Rather than just embracing the potential of computer-animated worlds, Al-Sabah challenges it by inverting their “logic” and questioning their highly politicised and constructed nature. The world created by Al-Sabah is a gateway to engage, reflect and imagine new ways of looking and thinking about how we live and experience the digital and real world.

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: 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 and Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council. In 2021 he received the Golden Fleece Award and he is currently a studio member at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Al-Sabah lives and works in Belfast and Dublin.

Video Interview | An Artistic Eye: Bassam Al-Sabah, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, June 2020.

Exhibition Handout

Interview | ‘Bassam Al-Sabah: The seduction of CGI and the limits of the self’ by Joni Zhu, Art Forum, February 2023.

Profile | ‘Meet the artist: Bassam Al-Sabah’, Sunday Business Post, February 2023.

Review | ‘Bassam Al-Sabah’s Dreamlike Odyssey through the Self’ by Eoghan Smyth, tn2 Magazine, February 2023.

Review | ‘Shimmer’, by Michael McDermott, Totally Dublin, January 2023.

Image: Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS, 2021, film still. Courtesy of the artist.

The exhibition was commissioned by The Douglas Hyde and is supported by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon through a Project Award and Fingal County Council through a Bursary Award.