Biolytic Daughter is an exhibition by Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan. The exhibition forms part of the programme Entanglements of the Apocalypse and is supported by Carefuffle.
At the centre of Biolytic Daughter is Uncensored Lilac, a 30-minute video work that tells a story of revenge and desire. A group of goddesses and their assembly of familiars, pets, servants, and technologies are lounging. Separated from one another, they share a land but not a common ground. They have been invaded. They are pretty, hot, bothered, and bored. They are ready to destroy each other. They look deep into the camera and recite their deepest wishes, hopes, dreams, and fantasies. Meanwhile, temperatures are rising. They morph and grow and make their rage known. Quick to anger, their tempers rise with the heat.
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. They describe their hopes and desires, bicker, interact from a distance, and refuse to unite. 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.
Within the exhibition space, a series of sculptures, multiple sized cutouts, paintings and prints extend this world out from the screen. The brutality of these mega-femmes comes to life: giant, veiny legs and a woolly sheep act as monuments disrupting the scale of the world built in the film and anchoring us to their climate-altered world. Contrasting the relationship between avatars and screens, and the feminine and the landscape – a common trope in feminist utopian literature – Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan question how we embody and are altered by climate collapse. Reflecting on the flatness of the screen, and their flattening of politics, they explore the impossibility and bureaucracy of being right in what can feel like the end of the world.
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah is an artist working with digital animation, painting, sculpture and textiles.
Jennifer Mehigan’s prints and paintings fuse diverse media and sources.
Carefuffle is a disabled and queer-led working group rooted in the principles of care, interconnectedness, authorship and social justice. VSSL Studio, Unit 8, 50 Resolution Way. Deptford, London, SE8 4AL from 6–30 November 2025
Exhibition Hours: Thursday–Saturday, 12–5 pm.
Website: https://vssl-studio.org/Bassam-Issa-Al-Sabah-and-Jennifer-Mehigan-Biolytic-Daughter
