‘VSSL Studio is delighted to announce Biolytic Daughter, an exhibition by Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan, co-curated by Mine Kaplangı, Benjamin Sebastian, Joseph Morgan Schofield, and Ash McNaughton. Running from 6–30 November 2025, the exhibition forms part of the programme Entanglements of the Apocalypse and is supported by Carefuffle, who collaborate creatively with the artists to shape access throughout the project. The programme is made possible with public funding from the National Lottery via Arts Council England and Cultúr Éireann / Culture Ireland.
At the centre of Biolytic Daughter is Uncensored Lilac, a 30-minute video work that tells a story of revenge and desire. A group of goddesses and their assembly of familiars, pets, servants, and technologies are lounging. Separated from one another, they share a land but not a common ground. They have been invaded. They are pretty, hot, bothered, and bored. They are ready to destroy each other. They look deep into the camera and recite their deepest wishes, hopes, dreams, and fantasies. Meanwhile, temperatures are rising. They morph and grow and make their rage known. Quick to anger, their tempers rise with the heat.
Set in a dreamlike hallucinatory landscape, the film features a series of monologues given by these mega-femme entities who have everything and nothing to say. They describe their hopes and desires, bicker, interact from a distance, and refuse to unite. In the cultivation of an economy where hotness equals power, this kind of global warming is no surprise – rising tempers and rising temperatures. Increasingly isolated from each other, they hold on tight to their apolitical, apathetic, consumer-driven dreams.
Within the exhibition space, a series of sculptures, multiple sized cutouts, paintings and prints extend this world out from the screen. The brutality of these mega-femmes comes to life: giant, veiny legs and a woolly sheep act as monuments disrupting the scale of the world built in the film and anchoring us to their climate-altered world. Contrasting the relationship between avatars and screens, and the feminine and the landscape – a common trope in feminist utopian literature – Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan question how we embody and are altered by climate collapse. Reflecting on the flatness of the screen, and their flattening of politics, they explore the impossibility and bureaucracy of being right in what can feel like the end of the world’.
Your work spans a wide range of materials and technologies, such as neural networks and 3D scanning of your garden. In Biolytic Daughter, how did these hybrid processes guide the exhibition’s creative output?
Jennifer Mehigan:I think these processes mainly impacted a few of the methods we used to develop the non-visual textures and the atmosphere through the voices and the score that was created by Jack Colleran. We were interested in weaving together different timelines and locations through sound, and establishing a sense of rural Ireland and its collisions with the past and the ‘future’ without falling back on the usual tropes that are always kind of hypersaturated and postcardy, like trad music, green fields, etc. We were also working with the idea of a collective storage system in voices and choirs to try and think about the physicality of the oral tradition and the mouth/throat region as this space of cultural memory in contrast to the cloud and the physical space it inhabits. So the characters use these ‘default’ voices from an AI programme and the score is entirely composed of digital sound simulations, but it all kind of merges together to become a hybrid portrait of the new machines of agriculture.
The main film of the exhibition depicts a fantastical landscape filled with ultra-feminine figures consumed by lust and disappointment. How do you see this “economy of hotness” serving as one of the critiques of contemporary culture and the nature of the woman?”
Jennifer Mehigan: I don’t know if it’s a critique or a cynical observation or if those are that different. I am interested in the algorithmic nature of financial domination and ‘successful’ images and in keeping with our focus on the physicality of the mouth, I was also interested in this reduction of senses that comes with the screen. I think some of it was also just wordplay. The prevalence of visual data systems and the focus on our eyeballs as primary sensory players feels like another type of loss that is also worth acknowledging in some way, but as primarily visual artists there’s a trap there. I think the trap of the screen and its economic interactions is similarly shared with ideas of ‘womanhood’ or whatever, but it’s not a very deep take.
You refer to the relationship between old and new image-making methods as a ‘strained mother-daughter bond. How does this analogy echo in this show, specially being that it is titled “Biolytic Daughter”?
Jennifer Mehigan:Yeah the title is taken from a description of Japanese knotweed plants in Ireland who all supposedly come from the same ‘mother’ plant. Biolytic is a term used to describe something that is life-destroying as opposed to supporting, but there are huge nutritional benefits to knotweed, it’s used to reduce inflammation and contains a lot of resveratrol which is an amazing neuroprotective compound. The fear of the ‘Other’ (and maybe here the ‘young-girl’ as well) has been written into our perception of ‘invasive’ plants, but there’s something so impressive about its general resistance as a living being. I live with it right on the edge of the boundaries of my garden and used to be scared of it, but I see now that it’s actually just a byproduct of the poor land management practices of Coillte and other logging companies. There’s this idea of invasive plants as outsiders that ruin things, but this has been done by us as a collective group. It didn’t have to be this way, but here we are. I think that kind of speaks to a lot of family dynamics and business practices as well.
Your PhD is concerned with the topics of isolation and ‘image hunger’ in post-Famine Ireland and it is particularly focused on the representation of women. Do these Ideas come out, either consciously or subconsciously, in this project’s investigation of power and visibility?
Jennifer Mehigan: I think that is always a thread throughout, but I am less interested in the inclusive practice of adding women retroactively to a narrative, and more interested in figuring out how they explored the gesture of wanting to disappear or being ‘disappeared’ into institutions, etc. So it is the opposite of representation, really, which can be described as abstraction or annihilation or whatever you want to throw in there as an antonym, there aren’t many appropriate ones in English. In Irish there is a word ‘fadbh’ that has a few meanings that all kind of revolve around the idea of a complication: a knot or a problem or a kind of puzzler, I think maybe that works for now and ties the ideas broadly together, somewhat.
How did your cooperation with Bassam Issa Al-Sabah change over time? What makes your partnership productive, especially when dealing with common issues like fantasy, technology, and corporeality?
Jennifer Mehigan: It is the play element that makes it productive, I think, and it’s nice to take a break from my head and go into Bassam’s world for a bit, and then they come into mine and we see what we can scrape together from both of them to create this hodge-podge of things that comes together into a story of some kind. It feels a bit like a break because we get to rely on each other for things and you get to look through your scraps of ideas that were probably never going to get made and see what someone else might do with them.
The exhibit is at the VSSL Studio as a part of a queer and trans-focused programme that is aimed at reimagining the apocalypse. How would you like us to understand the function of queerness and care in the process of re-envisioning destruction as a new form of reconditioning?
Jennifer Mehigan:I mean, one person’s apocalypse is another’s utopia, and we are seeing versions of that in the world right now, so I think it’s important to really familiarise ourselves with who made us feel a certain way about the future, and why? And to process that in loads of different ways that maybe aren’t cohesive or in agreement. Programmes like this make space for artists and audiences to come to grips with these kinds of slippery things, I think. The focus on care is also another really complicated thing to figure out and experiment with, and I am grateful for anyone trying to reckon with these big ideas in a way that tries to make things better for everyone across the board. Questions for Bassam Issa Al-Sabah
Your art challenges the boundaries of trauma and fantasy through created speculative worlds. In Biolytic Daughter, how do these virtual or imagined spaces aid you in expressing communal or personal histories of loss and rebuilding?
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah: In Biolytic Daughter, the virtual world isn’t so much an escape from loss as it is a way of living inside it differently. The imagined space becomes a kind of emotional prosthetic, a surface where memory, grief, and desire can overlap until they start to blur. It’s less about rebuilding in a heroic sense and more about watching collapse replay itself in slow motion, but with tenderness. There’s something about digital space, its shimmer, its artificial precision, that allows you to hold contradictions more easily. The beauty can sit right next to the wound, and both feel real.
We were interested in how speculative environments might metabolise trauma, how they can exaggerate it until it becomes almost operatic, so heightened it tips over into glamour or absurdity, like a ritual of failure that keeps transforming into something new.
The video work “Uncensored Lilac” depicts a trinity of goddesses who are lost between desire, rage, and alienation. How did you emotionally architect these characters, and do they reflect facets of your ongoing conversation with memory and identity?
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah: In Uncensored Lilac, the characters were never written as individuals so much as emotional states wearing bodies. They move through desire, rage, and alienation like shifting climates, sometimes indistinguishable from their surroundings, sometimes swallowed by them. A lot of it ties back to our ongoing conversation about identity as a moving surface rather than a fixed thing. The characters glitch because we do, because memory never really settles, and selfhood is always half-fabricated. So much of Uncensored Lilac is about that tension between wanting to be seen and wanting to disappear, between the urge to make beauty out of chaos and the awareness that the act itself might be hollow. Its emotional architecture built from fragments, designed to shimmer, fracture, and never quite resolve.
To a large extent, you incorporate elements from anime and video games into your artworks. What are the roles of these digital aesthetics as both escapism and confrontation in your practice?
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah: Anime and video games offer condensed languages of storytelling, a way to pack character, world, and emotion into highly stylized visuals. They’re full of contradictions: beauty and violence, playfulness and seriousness, intimacy and spectacle. That density allows me to explore ideas of identity, memory, and desire in a single image or sequence, and to build worlds where those tensions can coexist without needing to be resolved.
These digital spaces also allowed experimentation with visual and narrative forms in ways that feel immediate and immersive. The conventions of animated or game worlds , exaggeration, repetition, and layering, offer a toolkit for exploring how stories circulate and affect people, and how fantasy can both reflect and distort reality. Using them isn’t about imitation, it’s about translation: taking those coded languages and bending them to reflect the contradictions and textures of the worlds we want to make.
The installation through the help of sculpture and large-scale forms like the giant veiny legs or the woolly sheep extends the movie’s universe.How is scale important in your depiction of the digital image to a physical space?
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah: Scale is crucial because it transforms the way someone experiences the digital image. On screen, everything exists in a controlled frame, but when you bring that world into physical space, with giant limbs, oversized objects, or uncanny sculptures, it becomes immersive in a tactile, almost confrontational way. The exaggeration forces the viewer to navigate the work bodily, making the images feel alive, unstable, and slightly uncanny.
Translating the digital into the physical also emphasizes the strangeness and excess already present in the work. A detail that might read as ornamental or glossy on screen suddenly becomes monumental, even absurd, when it occupies a room. That shift changes the rhythm of the narrative and the audience’s engagement: they can’t just observe, they must move through it, reckon with it, and negotiate the space, which mirrors how the characters inhabit their own exaggerated, digitally saturated worlds.
How does Jennifer Mehigan’s collaboration influence your storytelling and materiality layers of this show? Were there any specific tensions or harmonies between your works that led to this shared world?
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah: Collaborating with Jennifer has been like entering a continuous feedback loop, our practices intersect, collide, and riff off each other in ways that shape both story and materiality. She brings a focus on texture, composition, and the sensuality of objects that complements my interest in narrative, character, and excess. That tension, between image and story, object and performance, is exactly what allows the world to feel both cohesive and unstable, like it’s always shifting just out of frame.
There’s a harmony in how we negotiate authorship: we swap ideas, swap roles, and often build off each other’s experiments in real time. Sometimes it’s playful, sometimes it’s dissonant, but that dynamic generates the glitches, exaggerations, and heightened details that define the shared universe of the show. The collaboration allows each layer, visual, sculptural, narrative, to feel simultaneously deliberate and slightly corrupted, reflecting the kind of worlds we’re interested in inhabiting.
What is the place of your work within the “Entanglements of the Apocalypse” series? How does your work challenge apocalyptic thinking – not as a final point, but rather as a cyclical or transformative process?
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah: My work situates itself in a space where collapse isn’t a single catastrophic moment but a constant, lived texture. In these worlds, apocalypse isn’t an endpoint, it’s a rhythm, a cycle of intensity, excess, and exhaustion that shapes how characters move, desire, and fail. The work explores the tension between beauty and collapse, spectacle and despair, showing how transformation can emerge even within repeated patterns of breakdown.
Rather than presenting solutions or finality, the pieces examine the ongoing negotiation with environments, systems, and desires that are already in flux. By rendering these cycles through digitally saturated imagery, sculptural interventions, and immersive spaces, the work challenges conventional apocalyptic thinking: it asks what it means to live, adapt, and persist within collapse, and how beauty, desire, and affect continue to circulate even as worlds fall apart and rebuild themselves around you.
Your current exhibition at VSSL incorporates low ambient lighting, diffusing the contrast of prints and 3D objects present in the space. Can you say a little about your reasons and thoughts behind this decision.
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah: The low ambient lighting was a deliberate choice to shape how the work is experienced, letting prints and 3D objects emerge gradually rather than hitting the viewer all at once. We wanted the images and sculptures to feel like little flirtations, intimate details that slowly reveal themselves as your eyes adjust to the acidic yellow glow, encouraging a slower, more attentive engagement with the space.
Diffusing contrast also allows the work to hover between presence and suggestion, so forms and images feel alive without being fully defined. It extends the atmosphere of the digital environments into the physical space, letting the exhibition unfold around the viewer rather than exist as a fixed display.
6–30 November 2025 _ Venue: VSSL Studio, Unit 8, 50 Resolution Way. Deptford, London, UK. SE8 4AL
Exhibition Hours: Thursday–Saturday, 12–5 pm