"Uncensored Lilac" (still) HD CGI Film (2024) © Bassam Issa Al-Sabah & Jennifer Mehigan.
In this conversation with artists Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan, we discuss “Biolytic Daughter”, their collaborative exhibition at VSSL Studio in London (6–30 November 2025), which unfolds within the programme “Entanglements of the Apocalypse”. Emerging from their collaborative film project “Uncensored Lilac,” the exhibition expands their shared world of digital mythology and queer sensuality into sculptural and spatial forms. Our discussion traces the feverish, ironic tenderness at the heart of their collaboration and how they navigate the blurred boundaries between beauty and collapse, digital desire and embodied decay. We also speak about working with Carefuffle––a disability- and queer-led working group rooted in the principles of care, interconnectedness, authorship and social justice––who have been supporting VSSL Studio and the artists in making the exhibition as accessible as possible. This collaboration has opened up new ways of thinking about care and access as integral to artistic production rather than as an afterthought.
“Entanglements of the Apocalypse” is a transdisciplinary programme exploring queer and trans imaginaries of world-building in response to ongoing collapse, co-curated by Mine Kaplangı, Benjamin Sebastian, Joseph Morgan Schofield and Ash McNaughton at VSSL Studio in London. Grounded in research and collective practice, it resists capitalist and colonial framings of apocalypse as an end, instead approaching it as a continuous condition, a site for transformation, intimacy, and speculative renewal.