Overview

Bassam Al-Sabah’s work aims to convey visions of war, resistance and perseverance. He utilizes multi-media installation comprising of video, painting, sculpture and printed matter. His work is concerned with how the past is continually revised to meet the present, when the juvenile fantasy breaks down into the reality of adulthood. 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.

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). He was shortlisted for the RDS Visual Arts Awards, curated by Alice Maher and was listed by art writer Gemma Tipton in the Irish Times as an artist to watch in 2017.

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, IMMA, Dublin; Pallas Periodical Review, Pallas Projects, Dublin; Futures, Series 3, Episode 2, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, and Syntonic State, Tulca 18, Galway.