Bassam Al-Sabah
A Paradise out of a Common Field
RTÉ
A Paradise out of a Common Field
Short Animation Film by Bassam Al-Sabah
'A Paradise Out Of A Common Field' is a short-animated film by Bassam Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan, that explores the iconography of the zombie. The origin of the zombie in general cultural history is relatively unknown, but within the confines of this film, she emerges from a lush garden and is submerged into the ocean. Playing with dream worlds that consist of feral horses and writhing flowers, horizons and image planes unfold to disorient viewers, while the audio transports you through an interpretation of the history of the Irish graveyard and its relationship to trauma.
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Zombies don’t have an origin
Feral zombie silence
Horses
Begins in lushness and ends in barrenness, return to water
Horizon and planes and fields
The unthinkable size of the ocean
Lack of orientation as to where the shore is
Images from
Paradise out of a Common Field
Bassam Al-Sabah
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). He will present a major solo show in gasworks, London in 2021 that will then tour to The De La Warr Pavilion. Recent solo exhibitions include 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 A Fiction Close to Reality, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Futures, Series 3, Episode 2, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, and Syntonic State, Tulca 18, Galway.
Jennifer Mehigan
Jennifer Mehigan (Ireland/Singapore) is an artist based in Belfast. With a background in floristry and graphic design, her work combines the cliches of contemporary recovery and self-help literature with queer Irish histories and the violent poetics of abstraction. Her often multi-disciplinary installations are grounded in a framework of painting, beginning as images that morph into text, sound, smell and taste. Mehigan regularly creates work in collaboration with Bassam Al-Sabah.