Bassam Issa Al-Sabah is interloping as a worldbuilder, with enough self-awareness to remain critical of algorithm-based worldbuilding, but just the right amount of naivety to let it sneak in anyway.
We could, kind of, regurgitate parts of one of last month’s reviews about freedom of movement and choice, being led by algorithm as an observer and being unable to take control of your online life. And that show was at FACT too (still is). This is, across most of its themes, the same principal idea.
The artist here, though, feels like they are more consciously aware of the ties that bind both the natural world and the digital one. Throughout his practice, monumental sculpture and the scale of creation have been significant parts of Bassam Issa Al-Sabah’s work. Here, you are first introduced to holographic cards as tall as you are. You’re toured through a room where the floor is no longer the limit, and monuments are weightless.
If you piece together the perceived evils of the online world (algorithm-led personality, unchallenged oversight, information monopoly) it’s not necessarily that the digital space is the problem. It’s not even that a handful of corporations retain that scale of information about how we do, and can influence our future. Because all of that existed already.
The monuments here might be decaying, ruinous representations of the natural world, but they also call back to Greek and Roman design. The holographic cards recall nature, but also the collectibles of the 1980s and 90s. Throughout history, a handful of corporations and man-made social structures have had oversight on our lives and influenced us based on what we see or what we buy.
Or what we acquire. Not buy. What we aspire to have, or to be. Again, though, there’s a very present way of presenting a very old issue: Digital media presents unattainable standards. Today, that’s AI. Before that, it was social media. Before that, it was Photoshop. Before that, it was airbrushing. Beauty standards and standards of success have always been distorted as a tool by those who would benefit.
Our world, our aspirations for it, are just easier to influence now.
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah does differentiate this present deamlike quality of digital media from the dictated desires of analogue life. The installation does feel uniquely critical of the ease of access to these windows of impossible things to emulate.
And in that criticism, he creates a landscape where you can join him, hiding in plain sight from everything we are all hypocritically critical of and addicted to.
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Bassam Issa Al-Sabah: The Mission is the End, The End is All I Want! Is at FACT until 22nd February 2026
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith