Bassam Issa Al-Sabah works across digital animation, painting, sculpture, and textiles to create surreal environments that offer visions of resistance, transformation, and queer possibility. His imagined worlds provide space to reconsider both personal and collective existence, where fantasy serves as both a refuge and a site of reckoning.
At FACT, Al-Sabah unveils THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT! (2025), a new body of work examining the dreamlike qualities of digital media. At the centre of the exhibition is a new CGI film that follows a cast of fantastical characters as they navigate the tension between following, resisting, and choosing their own paths. Alongside the film, visitors encounter a series of large-scale, shattered sculptures. These artefacts, disembodied and suspended between ruin and revelation, appear to have collided with one another to form new, hybrid objects that evoke a sense of collapse, shift, and pull within the space.
In THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT!, Al-Sabah reflects on how online spaces—often celebrated for their promise of connection and freedom—can instead flatten and distort the user’s reality and sense of self. Shaped by algorithms and the systems behind them, digital profiles can be curated to alter appearances and determine how people wish to be seen. Within this immersive installation, the artist invites visitors to look beyond the glossy surfaces and seductive imagery of digital culture, and to ask whether these idealised images reflect the viewer’s desires, or whether identities have been moulded to desire the impossible.
Drawing from video game mechanics and digital aesthetics, Al-Sabah constructs environments that feel immersive yet tightly controlled. Through this lens, he examines how hidden ideas and beliefs seep into world building—from dangerous ideologies to artificial lifestyles. Al-Sabah uses the imagined world to rethink what is possible and explores fantasy as a tool for survival rather than escape.
Press release from FACT Liverpool
Image: Bassam Issa Al-Sabah. THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT!. 2025. Film still. Image courtesy of the artist
