Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, Jennifer Mehigan
Uncensored Lilac
Screening
5–26 August 2026
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
Opening
WED, 5 August at 8 PM
Uncensored Lilac is a film by Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan that tells a story about revenge and desire. The 30-minute film that follows a group of goddesses and their companions. Their land and ways of communication with each other have been destroyed by climate collapse, and as the temperature rises, strange forms of dissonant and dissident behaviour emerge between them. 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. 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.
This work is deeply rooted in the default architectures of CGI software and their overwhelming whiteness. The pre-set bodies that populate digital space, smooth, symmetrical, racially unmarked yet unmistakably coded, become the base material from which these goddesses emerge. Inheriting the biases of these programs, the figures occupy a landscape already colonised by aesthetic standardisation. Their beauty is not neutral; it is templated. This default whiteness mirrors the film’s climate of invasion and estrangement, a world where even fantasy is pre-formatted, where desire is engineered through consumer software, and where power circulates through the metrics of hotness. The goddesses’ simmering rage, their isolation, and their readiness to destroy one another are entangled with this digital inheritance. They are born from systems that flatten difference while promising infinite customization. As temperatures rise, so too does the pressure of this inherited normativity, until the very defaults begin to fracture, morph, and revolt.
THE AUTHORS
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah is a visual artist working across film, animation, sculpture, and installation. His practice explores digital and material forms, shifting identities, and the circulation of emotion in contemporary culture. Notable solo exhibitions include THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT! (FACT, Liverpool, 2025), Uncensored Lilac (transmediale, Berlin, 2024) and ITS DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS (Douglas Hyde Gallery, 2022). Al-Sabah has shown internationally at venues like the Barbican Centre, Jue De Paume, and LIAF Biennale. He has received prestigious awards including the Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction (2023) and The Golden Fleece Award (2021).
Jennifer mehigan’s prints and paintings fuse diverse media and sources, including 3D scans of her garden, images of plants growing on the graves of strange Irish women, the archive of the Victorian portrait photographer Lady Clementina Hawarden, four-dimensional drawings by the Cork-born mathematician Alicia Boole, and an encrypted Renaissance codex known as the Voynich manuscript. Using paint, inkjet, graphics cards, neural networks, pearl powder and gel, her works blend new and old methods of making and processing the world – a relationship the artist views as a ‘strained mother-daughter bond’. Mehigan’s wider practice also incorporates CGI, sculpture, perfumery, writing, parties, artificial intelligence and horticulture, deploying sensory experience to explore queerness and femininity.
CREDITS
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan
Uncensored Lilac, 2024
single-channel video, 30 min.
Sound by Jack Colleran
Commissioned for transmediale 2024
Production of the event:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2026
Consultancy and conceptual framework:
Nora O’ Murchú
Financial support:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Municipality of Ljubljana