Fenced within the silent cold walls

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Bassam Al-Sabah’s Fenced within the silent cold walls is a CGI film which takes the viewer through a recreation of the artist’s former home in Iraq, a home that his family can no longer return to. Appearing from out of the expanse of an endless, desolate desert, the house is digitally rendered in detail, but as the viewer is led through, uncanny images are manifested into organic forms, erupting from abandoned communications devices. The film concludes with the voice of the artist’s grandmother, who narrates the moment when the family split and her children migrated to different parts of the world. “Within a second, I was left all alone, surrounded by all their memories.” As she describes burning these sentimental objects, we see a trash can on fire, with digital forms emerging from it before disintegrating. Complementing the film, Al-Sabah’s Familiar Scenes That Refuse to Stay is a series of paintings on glass, plexiglass and board that combines images from family photographs with anime cartoons, stacked and layered on top of each other, evoking the fading of memory.