18 Feb 2026
Hyperreal Surfaces, Dissolving Bodies: Exploring CGI and Myth in Bassam Issa Al-Sabah’s Work
Interviewby Alexander Burenkov
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah is a multidisciplinary artist based between Dublin and Glasgow, whose work spans video, sculpture, painting, textiles, and printed matter. Their practice explores resistance, world-making, and post-capitalist desire, oscillating between online universes, post-apocalyptic terrains, and fleshy, corporeal realities. At the heart of their work lies an interest in how the past is continually revised to meet the present—when juvenile fantasies, often inspired by Arabic-dubbed Japanese anime from the 1980s onward, collide with the pressures of adulthood, displacement, nostalgia, and personal mythology.
In their recent solo exhibition at FACT Liverpool, THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT!, Al-Sabah immerses viewers in glitching, morphing digital landscapes and sculptural installations that exist on the edge of collapse. Their CGI films and installations inhabit a space of contradictions, fluctuating between immemorial mythologies and queer futures, where avatars and fragmented figures navigate cycles of adaptation, reinvention, and disappearance. Drawing from anime memories, fan cultures, and autobiographical anecdotes, Al-Sabah’s work deconstructs colonial legacies while exploring new forms of selfhood, collectivity, and identity in constant becoming. Through the interplay of digital and physical media, their practice positions CGI as both a material and emotional medium, revealing its emancipatory potential as well as its ideological constraints in post-digital culture.
Alexander Burenkov: Many of your recent shows place CGI and computer animation at the heart of physical installations. How does working with CGI change your relationship to materiality and craft compared with painting or textile work?
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah: For me, CGI is not fundamentally different from painting, textiles, or ceramics: it’s another material to engage with intimately, with its own logic, limits, and resistance. I’m less interested in producing images than in what each medium allows me to feel and test sensorially. CGI becomes a space where materiality is pushed rather than abandoned. I deliberately intensify textures and surfaces to the point of excess—skin becomes hyper-glossy, materials shimmer and strain, as if on the verge of breaking out of their digital containment. This tension between the hyper-real and the impossible becomes the work’s materiality. CGI doesn’t just simulate reality; it seems to yearn toward something else, something both familiar and unknowable. Because CGI is so deeply embedded in how we see the world—through games, films, interfaces—it carries real emotional weight. I’m interested in that paradox: its limitless potential versus its virtual constraints, a tension that feels almost alchemical.
AB: Your worlds often feel like speculative mythologies or afterlives. How do you use digital tools to develop narrative logic and characters that might otherwise emerge from literary or theatrical practices?
BIA: Although the work may resemble speculative mythologies or afterlives, the narrative doesn’t come from storytelling in a traditional sense. Digital tools allow me to build worlds first—shaping physics, atmospheres, textures, and constraints—and let narrative emerge indirectly from those conditions. Once a world has its own internal logic, figures begin to behave in ways that suggest ritual or myth without being scripted.
The figures aren’t characters so much as avatars or iterations that glitch, merge, or dissolve under environmental pressure. They emerge like ghosts from a space rather than protagonists from a plot. Working digitally lets me embrace instability and nonlinearity; it’s closer to choreographing a weather system than writing a story. Any mythology that appears does so because the world demands it. Narrative becomes atmospheric rather than linear—something you sense rather than follow.
AB: In previous interviews, you’ve spoken about the “seduction of CGI” and its limits. Do you see CGI primarily as an emancipatory tool for world-making, or also as a medium with its own set of constraints and ideological legacies?
BIA: CGI is seductive because it lets me break free from the constraints of the physical world, creating forms, landscapes, and realities that exist only digitally. It’s enormously emancipatory—allowing speculative worlds, futures, and mythologies unbound by existing rules or ideologies.
At the same time, CGI carries constraints and ideological legacies. It is embedded in systems of power: the commercial and militaristic interests of tech, mass-media consumption, capitalism, consumerism, and even surveillance. Technical limitations—rendering, coding, data structures—also shape what can be produced and how stories are structured. The seduction of CGI—the allure of hyperrealism and spectacle—can mask these constraints. My work engages both its freedom and its limitations, questioning how digital tools shape perception and reinforce dominant narratives.
AB: Your imagery often stages queer possibility and bodily multiplicity. How does the post-digital frame (avatars, morphing, glitch aesthetics) enable new ways to represent gender, diaspora, and bodily histories?
BIA: Avatars, morphing, and glitches let me explore identity as fluid, fractured, and in constant motion. CGI enables bodies and selves to shift, merge, and dissolve, reflecting the pressures of late capitalism and the demands of visibility. Gender, diaspora, and bodily histories become performative processes rather than fixed categories. The flickering, morphing, and glitching disrupt coherence, critiquing authenticity and the commodification of identity. The digital space amplifies this tension, showing how power and identity can dissolve into surface and spectacle, leaving room for the unfinished, unsettled, and unresolved.
AB: The title of your current solo exhibition, THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT!, suggests both exhaustion and persistence. Is it a commentary on the endless loops of digital culture—the scroll, the feed, the game level—where completion is impossible yet compulsively pursued?
BIA: This project draws heavily from the idea of performance at a time when identity, pain, and even authenticity feel like it’s been commodified. I’ve worked on a project before with Jennifer Mehigan titled Uncensored Lilac, where we explored how larger-than-life, mythological feminine figures deliver monologues about revenge, the environment, and capital, all while remaining isolated in their consumer-driven dreams. The characters are trapped in a kind of self-performance, always adapting, always visible, but never really connected.
And this project feels like a continuation of that thinking. What you see in this exhibition isn’t transformation as liberation, but transformation as maintenance. These avatars are caught in an exhausting loop of rebranding, trying to survive in a world that consumes and discards without pause. In this sense, the film’s voice, constantly shifting between avatars, represents not a quest for identity but a collapse of it, where the process of adapting becomes the substance itself. There’s a perverse pleasure in this collapse, a kind of eroticism in erasure: to be constantly consumed by the very system that demands its performance.
This endless cycle, this mission of constant self-dissolution, and in that erasure, there’s something almost seductive: the quiet, the surrender, the refusal to perform anymore. The exhaustion isn’t just the byproduct of overexposure. There’s no final destination in sight—just an ongoing, compulsive loop of performance and self-erasure.
AB: You draw heavily on video game mechanics and worldbuilding aesthetics. How do you see gaming language (levels, missions, upgrades) mirroring the architectures of power and control we experience in digital life?
BIA: I think these gaming dynamics give us a kind of language to understand power in the digital spaces. The game-world becomes a way of structuring our reality, where both agency and control are in constant tension. But like in many video games, there are always rules to be bent, systems to be gamed, and possibilities for reimagining or even breaking free of those systems. So, while there’s power in these architectures, there’s also potential for subversion, something that I think speaks to our ongoing desire to challenge the systems we live under, even in digital spaces.
I’m interested in how this tension plays out through environments that never fully settle, spaces where film, sculpture, and light behave almost like unstable game levels. The figures and forms drift, glitch, and recalibrate, replicating the feeling of being constantly asked to adapt or upgrade just to stay visible. The sculptures pick up that same energy: they borrow the language of classical monumentality but appear fragmented, hollowed out, as if caught mid-respawn or mid-collapse. They feel like avatars pushed to the limits of their rendering. I’m interested in what it means to sit inside that loop, not to resolve it, but to let things flicker and fade, to acknowledge the exhaustion built into these systems while still searching for moments of softness or refusal inside them.
AB: The installation creates a space that seems to be collapsing or glitching around us. Was this instability something you wanted to physically evoke—a metaphor for the fragility of digital perfection or of identity itself?
BIA: The installation began with the idea of roleplay. Playing Baldur’s Gate 3 made me think about how we project ourselves through avatars—and, in daily life, through professional, social, or curated roles. These roles are porous, fragile, constantly shifting, and barely held together. The film and sculptures reflect that instability. The figures aren’t fixed characters but fragments—bursts of performative energy, aware they could dissolve at any moment. There’s a tension between intensity and fragmentation, desire and boredom, presence and disappearance. The space, with its shifting light and unstable forms, mirrors this: nothing is ever complete, yet it keeps moving, performing, and re-rendering itself.
AB: The show suggests that fantasy can be a tool for survival, not escape. How do you define the kind of fantasy your work proposes—especially in contrast to the aspirational fantasies marketed through digital culture?
BIA: The fantasy I propose in this work isn’t one of escapism, in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s a way of surviving the conditions of a world where we are constantly forced to adapt, perform, and transform to meet external expectations. Fantasy often becomes something aspirational: a promise of transformation into an ideal self or a perfect body, one that's often unattainable or trivial, built on surface-level models. These fantasies are marketed to us as products, offering a kind of temporary relief or validation that’s always just out of reach.
In contrast, the fantasy in my work isn’t about reaching some final goal or vision of perfection. It’s about the process of losing shape, of vanishing into something that resists definition. It’s an embrace of disappearance rather than ascension. This fantasy is less about escaping reality and more about creating a space for relief within it. It’s a form of survival within a system that demands persistent reinvention. The bodies and forms in the film and sculptures don’t become “better” or “more whole.” They are in a constant state of instability, fragmented, shifting, and collapsing under the pressure to perform, and yet, in that dissolution, they find a certain freedom, I hope.
AB: Your recent commissions convert galleries into immersive dreamscapes. How do you think audiences navigate the shift from physical sculpture to projected/animated worlds—and how do you design that transition?
BIA: The shift from sculpture to projected or animated worlds creates a tension I actively explore. CGI is polished, hyper-real, and gravity-defying, while physical sculptures—metal, polystyrene, etc.—are grounded and tactile. Placing them together sets up a dialogue: the solidity and scale of the sculpture counterpoints the fluid, limitless possibilities of the digital, highlighting the contrast between physical reality and the surreal, illusory world of CGI.
AB: Your practice has referenced Arabic-dubbed anime and popular media as source materials. How do you negotiate the ethics and politics of appropriation in a moment where digital images circulate globally and are easily recontextualised?
BIA: Appropriation in my work recontextualizes cultural symbols to question power and representation. Growing up in the Middle East, Arabic-dubbed anime like UFO Robo Grendizer provided an escape from political instability and shaped my early experience, and by transforming such figures—deflating once-heroic characters—I critique the ideals and narratives they convey. These globalized images now circulate freely, raising important questions about whose narratives are represented and who controls them. The ethics lie in using these images to reveal their limitations and contradictions, engaging critically with their histories and the ways violence, identity, and power are represented across cultures.
AB: Do you worry that digital reproduction flattens context and meaning? How do you preserve specificity of place, language or memory when a CGI or animated image can be infinitely re-posted and re-used?
BIA: I don’t worry so much about digital reproduction flattening meaning, as I’m interested in the conditions that make that flattening inevitable. We’re already living in an environment where images circulate faster than context can attach to them, where anything like a memory, a body, or a landscape can be detached from its origin and turned into a surface. Rather than trying to fight that, I work with it. I’m more interested in revealing the pressure it creates: the exhaustion of constantly being translated, edited, re-rendered.
For me, specificity comes from the way the works operate within a space, not from the image alone. Even if a CGI frame can be infinitely reposted, the installations are built to anchor the digital image to a particular atmosphere. The digital elements always have something to push against, a material body, a scale, a texture. and that friction creates its own kind of memory. It’s less about protecting the image from being decontextualized and more about creating an environment where context is felt physically, where the digital can’t fully escape the gravity of place. If the image drifts out into the world afterward, flattened or re-used, that’s almost part of the work ….a reminder of how unstable meaning becomes once it starts to circulate.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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