"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.
Mine Kaplangi: “Uncensored Lilac” is a video that unfolds as a feverish landscape of desire, isolation, and collapse. Featuring a cast of mega-femme entities delivering monologues within a dreamlike, hallucinatory world, the film blends real performers with constructed and digitally altered environments. Could you tell us how your collaboration shaped the tone and rhythm of this work? How did your individual practices meet or flirt in the making of this world?
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah: “Uncensored Lilac” really did emerge from this feverish, almost giddy space of exhaustion and play. Both Jennifer and I had just come off these massive solo exhibition projects, and this felt like a chance to shed some skin, to cosplay as each other’s artistic shadows. The collaboration was this weird, beautiful feedback loop: Jennifer would throw out an image, something so glossy and charged, and I’d try to build it, to make it real in the most artificial way possible. Then I’d text her some half-formed monologue idea and she’d turn it into this razor-sharp, bitter-sweet script that the characters would spit out like they were both confessing and mocking themselves.
We joke that our process is like an AI prompt relationship between us. You know, the kind where you keep refining the output until it’s so hyper-specific it becomes absurd. But that absurdity is where the world we built lives. The tone of the film, that mix of anger and apathy, desire and detachment, came from letting ourselves be both the creators and the consumers of this world. We were making fun of it even as we were building it, which is maybe why the characters feel so hollow and so full at the same time. They’re us, but they’re also this exaggerated, CGI-slick version of what happens when you let bitterness and beauty collide.
Jennifer Mehigan: For me I think of my practice as this quite scattered thing that is essentially trapped by 4 edges, right angles and corners, but within those it is curious about beauty and desire and this general feeling of wanting to reach the end of something or the limits of it. Whether that’s the tools or the language I’m using or the actual container that it’s trapped in, I’m not really sure. When we work together ‘in the rectangle’ it creates this situation in which you can be like half-invested, but also doubly in a way, because it’s a friendship as well and I feel like we are learning as we go with that, too. So it becomes this place to break out of our usual habits and interests and try new things, particularly because of this idea of autobiography and authenticity that tends to be projected onto you as an artist. There’s a more obvious layer of plausible deniability baked into things, so it’s a nice dynamic to camouflage yourself in for a while. It reminds me a bit of the ‘exquisite corpse exercise’, where it starts out with me writing and Bassam building a scene, and we go back and forth and swap and it comes out the other end as this thing neither of us really expected until a deadline tells us to hit pause. Nothing ever really starts or ends, it’s just a continued, shared exploration of things we have been thinking about or affected by that gets a bit corrupted as it goes on.
"Biolytic Daughter" Exhibition view at VSSL Studio (London) © Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan; Photos © Marco Berardi & Baiba Sprance, 2025
MK: The figures in “Uncensored Lilac” seem to hover between beauty and brutality, digital and flesh, myth and screen. How do you think about embodiment and texture in your collaborative process, especially across digital and physical media?
BIA: Embodiment and texture in “Uncensored Lilac” were always about this push and pull. We wanted to create something so hyper-beautiful it became grotesque, so saturated that it tipped into the sublime and then kept going, until it felt almost violent in its excess. The film started as this fantasy of pure, digital glamour, but the more we worked, the more we realized we were chasing the moment where beauty curdles, where the shimmer starts to feel like a rind, or a scar. The voices, too, are digitally generated, which adds to this flat, affectless quality, like the characters are speaking through a filter, or from inside a screen. We leaned hard into the seduction of digital surfaces, pushing them until they became this flattened luxury: something useless, but so erotic in its emptiness. The contrast between those heavily embellished, almost sticky textures and the apathetic, synthetic monologues was intentional. It’s a way to think about beauty in a time that feels like it’s always the end of the world. Something you can’t help but desire, even as you know it’s hollow, or worse, that it’s consuming you.
The film is us thinking out loud or maybe trying to live out some kind of melancholic death drive. I was obsessed with the idea of characters who are both mythical and trapped in the screen, who want to transcend but can’t stop performing their own collapse. It’s a love letter to the ugliness of wanting, to the texture of failure, and to this overwhelming flat, erotic glow.
JM: I think for the most part it’s really rooted in the very broad and generalised textures and creatures of the rural Irish landscape and the west coastline, and this sense of something kind of erotic going on but also a deprivation that runs through it, and this collective sense of loss that is in contradiction with the way we continue to move forward. So we have taken this feeling of like, environmental bondage, and through digital media we’ve tried to inject it with this sensual excess that is cast over Ireland more through our collective imaginations and myths more than the reality of everyday agriculture and plantation schemes. The film has a section in the beginning that talks about the 1997 film “Contact” and the idea of things being dressed up in palatable simulations as a type of kindness and kinship and I think that really puts another perspective on making things that feel ‘pretty,’ which is often like a point of contention when you’re making art. We are both trying to figure that out in different ways, and sometimes it goes wrong, but it’s a tactic we’re negotiating with in every film.
"Uncensored Lilac" (still) HD CGI Film (2024) © Bassam Issa Al-Sabah & Jennifer Mehigan.
MK: Both of your practices are deeply invested in speculative and mythic imagery; Bassam through fantasy and trauma, Jennifer through queerness, femininity, and sensory excess. How are you each developing these threads in your current or upcoming individual projects?
BIA: I’ve just opened a solo exhibition at FACT Liverpool ( “THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT!”) which opened in late October this year. The exhibition was a fevered roleplay between selfhood and spectacle, a descent into the holes, portals, and feedback loops of identity as it mutated under late capitalism. The work slips through avatars and alter-egos, each one trying and failing to stay coherent inside a world that feeds on projection. It’s about bodies as interfaces, language as contagion, and the erotic charge of losing shape in public.
Meanwhile, Jennifer and I are developing a film project that’s all about the erotics of disappearance, the thrill of not being seen and the violence of hyper-visibilty. We’ve been exploring how certain bodies—particularly women’s, and especially when framed in cars or in motion—are both intensely fetishised and perpetually at risk of vanishing. It’s a film about the gaze as a kind of hunger, and invisibility as a perverse kind of power. It’s a love letter to the art of the getaway––from the screen, from context, from narratives, from itself.
JM: I am working on a research publication or artist book that looks at the palette, the sketchbook and their digital expansion. I’ve been reading a lot of novels about glamorous and kind of toxic women from the early 1900s to now and the idea of perfume is seeping back in slowly to things. I’m thinking about the materiality of those objects in a more metaphysical than digital way. That will probably inform our next film as well.
"Biolytic Daughter" Exhibition view at VSSL Studio (London) © Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan; Photos © Marco Berardi & Baiba Sprance, 2025
MK: “Biolytic Daughter” situates itself in a world of “rising tempers and rising temperatures.” How does the idea of apocalypse, or entanglements of the apocalypse, resonate for you?
BIA: “Biolytic Daughter” sits inside a world where collapse has become ambient. Where the apocalypse isn’t a rupture but a texture. To me it’s less about an ending than about the strange normalcy of living through one. The characters move through this glossy, overheated space where luxury and despair coexist, where even the act of feeling anything has become aestheticized. In one section a character cycles through the colours of her SSRI pills (antidepressants) like a rainbow, there’s humour in it, but also a kind of quiet horror. The apocalypse in this feels banal, even boring to them. They’re not panicking or waiting for salvation; they’re suspended in an in-between, between collapse and excess, numbness and desire. There’s something absurd about how hard they’re still trying to be right, or beautiful, or composed, while everything is already burning. I think we really tried to lean into this tension between the glittering surfaces of consumer fantasy and the melancholy that seeps through them.
JM: In the treatment for the film there was this idea of the apocalypse as being a self-determined moment where this group of women reached their limits and decided to try something else, and there’s this tinge of disgust and nostalgia towards their old lives and how they’re coping with the relative blandness of their new fantasy world or utopia. The script pulls from a lot of ‘recovery’ literature so in terms of the idea of the apocalypse, it follows the usual questions of when does someone decide they’ve had enough, and what happens after? Like that age-old question of ‘what happens the day after the revolution?’ So it’s using this premise of ‘everywhere you go, there you are’ to think through to the other side without positing any real solutions and ends in ideas about revenge, but even that still keeps you really attached to this idea of the past, and inhabiting that space is really important in the stages of grief or whatever, but ultimately it’s like: “is that it?” These characters don’t know that they have all been invaded by a larger, benevolent self-destructive element that wants to destroy everything anyway, so there’s this drawn out process of always being trapped in something else’s desires, and the 3D environment underlines that.
MK: The exhibition extends “Uncensored Lilac” beyond the screen, into sculpture, cutouts, and prints. How did translating this digital mythology into physical space change your relationship to the work or to the audience entering that world?
BIA: The idea behind the sculptures was that the world of the film could interrupt the physical space, like it’s leaking out of the screen and mutating in real time. They’re usually larger than life: huge limbs breaking through the floor, fragments of animals jutting out of walls, objects that feel both monumental and slightly unreal. Some of them are intentionally glitched, as if they’re still processing or buffering, which ties them back to the unstable, dream-logic of the film. The glossy plastic surfaces and printed textures carry that same sense of excess as the characters, everything a little too polished, too saturated, but still slightly off. The sound moves through the space as well, spilling over the sculptures and images, creating this uneasy sense of continuity between them. For “Uncensored Lilac”, we worked with Jack Colleran on the sound design, and what he created really expanded the atmosphere of the film. It made the space feel alive, almost breathing, like the film hadn’t ended but was still evolving, still glitching, around whoever walked in.
JM: I think it just breaks the exhibition out of this feeling of impenetrability that can come from watching a film in a gallery setting. The cutout is a marketing tool, it’s an object we are all familiar with that allows you to experience something in between 2 and 3 dimensions. I think Bei Badgirl calls it a 2.5D sculpture, borrowing from the way cartoons are made. Being able to play with scale, because of the cutouts is also something done in the film where there’s a woman busting out of a temple, and it calls on “Alice in Wonderland” and those feelings of misperception between your body and space that can happen when you’re too tired and the grip on reality feels a little looser. I guess they are a softer way of pointing at something a bit destabilising without actually inflicting it on the audience, which would be quite unpleasant. I am just not a fan of theme parks, VR and more immersive experiences. It’s a nice analogue way of rendering a digital environment, and I think both of us are quite attached to the idea of making ‘real’ things.
"Uncensored Lilac" (still) HD CGI Film (2024) © Bassam Issa Al-Sabah & Jennifer Mehigan.
MK: You’ve been assisted and supported by Carefuffle to make the exhibition more accessible. How has this collaboration influenced the process and experience of creating the work? At what stages of the project do questions of access and care enter your creative and production practices?
BIA: Working with Carefuffle has been a profound learning experience. I’m always thinking about accessibility when I’m making work, but it can be difficult to know where to start beyond the more obvious things like subtitles or alt text. Collaborating with Anita from Carefuffle completely shifted that perspective. They were able to imagine the accessibility elements not as afterthoughts or add-ons, but as extensions of the work itself. Something that could live inside the same world as the film and the installation. That approach really changed the process for me. It made me think about how the sensory and spatial experiences of the work could open in different directions, and how care could be embedded from the beginning rather than applied at the end. Accessibility became a kind of methodology, a way of shaping how the work is built, how it’s shared, and how people move through it.
-> vssl-studio.org/Biolytic-Daughter