3 Aug 2026
Phantasmagoria: Field Image by Bassam Issah Al-Sabah
In this episode, we speak with artist Bassam Issah Al-Sabah about his new audio work Field Image, where landscapes shaped by extraction, memory and technological infrastructure are contextualised through the shifting terrain of the Irish bog. Beginning with the work's disembodied narrator, we explore what it means to become part of a landscape where human presence lingers only through traces. The conversation then moves towards the bog as an ancient archive, existing alongside a contemporary landscape increasingly reshaped by data centres and digital infrastructure.Together we discuss how folk knowledge, ecological systems and colonial histories intersect with computational technologies. We consider whether plants, folklore and older systems of organising land might operate as forms of resistance that repel the infrastructures imposed upon them. Thinking about the material realities of the digital through heat, soil, extraction and energy, the conversation challenges immaterial information and asks what ancient technologies and embodied ways of knowing might reveal in an age obsessed with data and legibility. This mini-series is commissioned by the Henry Moore Institute as a part of their program for their exhibition Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, open 15th May - 30th August 2026.Bios;Bassam Issa Al-Sabah works CGI animation, sculpture, textiles, painting, and installation, constructing speculative worlds where fantasy, mythology, and digital culture become methods for reimagining identity, memory, and collective futures. Drawing on the visual languages of anime, video games, and online image cultures, his practice explores transformation as a queer methodology, proposing mutable bodies, mythic narratives, and hybrid ecologies as alternatives to fixed understandings of gender, history, and belonging. Recent work has increasingly engaged feminist and posthuman perspectives, using fiction as a critical framework through which care, desire, revenge, and interdependence can be imagined beyond patriarchal and colonial structures.Al-Sabah's work has been presented extensively across Europe in museums, galleries, and festivals, including the Barbican Centre, London; Jeu de Paume, Paris; FACT Liverpool; De La Warr Pavilion; and The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin. Alongside his solo practice, he has developed an ongoing collaborative body of work with artist Jennifer Mehigan, extending his interest in speculative storytelling through large-scale installation, animation, sculpture, and publishing. Across both solo and collaborative projects, his work continues to investigate how fiction, digital technologies, and myth can produce new ways of understanding ecology, kinship, and collective experience. His work is held in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), the Arts Council of Ireland, and Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council Using paint, inkjet, neural networks, her garden and her phone, Jennifer Mehigan’s prints and paintings blend new and old methods of processing the world. She positions the relationships between contemporary image-making technologies and their predecessors as a ‘strained mother-daughter’ dynamic, encompassing wider ideas of reproduction and inheritance in image ecologies. For the past seven years, her research has oriented around the Famine to present alternative vantage points of what abstraction means in an embodied context, its relationship to ideas of appetite and fertility, and how it can be considered both an applied and innate technology. The mouth and throat are interrogated as sites of image production, becoming ‘embodied printers’ in which oral histories and their materialities might be made visual to renegotiate the conditions of abstraction as we understand them now. Her wider practice incorporates sculpture, filmmaking, publishing, perfumery, and parties, deploying sensory experiences to explore ideas of movement and digestion as it is outsourced to machines. She regularly works in partnership with artist Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and has previously collaborated with and been part of collectives such as Synthesize_Her, Temporary Pleasure, Fruit Shop, and The 343. Recent shows include multiple iterations of ‘Uncensored Lilac’ in Aksioma, Ljubljana (2026), VSSL Studio, London (2025), and Transmediale, Berlin (2024); ‘Nightbloom Chokehold’ in Douglas Hyde Gallery 2, Dublin (2022); and group shows and screenings include Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2023), Anafi Film Festival, Greece (2025) and FACT Liverpool, UK (2026). She is currently a research fellow at the International Centre for the Image, Dublin. Previously based in Singapore and Belfast, she now lives and works in rural Limerick.Broadcast through @rtm.fmHost @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke Artist @this.isnowhere Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v
