Two free exhibitions by artists Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Nina Davies reveal the tensions that emerge when digital representations begin to replace real experiences.
Through speculative storytelling and immersive worldbuilding, these new works commissioned by FACT Liverpool examine how digital technologies flatten, fragment and distort the realities they seek to copy. Exhibitions run from Friday 24 October 2025 to Sunday 22 February 2026.
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah works across digital animation, painting, sculpture, and textiles to create surreal environments that offer visions of resistance, transformation, and queer possibility. His imagined worlds provide space to reconsider both personal and collective existence, where fantasy serves as both a refuge and a site of reckoning.
At FACT, Al-Sabah unveils THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT! (2025), a new body of work examining the dreamlike qualities of digital media. At the centre of the exhibition is a new CGI film that follows a cast of fantastical characters as they navigate the tension between following, resisting, and choosing their own paths. Alongside the film, visitors encounter a series of large-scale, shattered sculptures. These artefacts, disembodied and suspended between ruin and revelation, appear to have collided with one another to form new, hybrid objects that evoke a sense of collapse, shift, and pull within the space.
In THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT!, Al-Sabah reflects on how online spaces—often celebrated for their promise of connection and freedom—can instead flatten and distort the user’s reality and sense of self. Shaped by algorithms and the systems behind them, digital profiles can be curated to alter appearances and determine how people wish to be seen. Within this immersive installation, the artist invites visitors to look beyond the glossy surfaces and seductive imagery of digital culture, and to ask whether these idealised images reflect the viewer’s desires, or whether identities have been moulded to desire the impossible.
Drawing from video game mechanics and digital aesthetics, Al-Sabah constructs environments that feel immersive yet tightly controlled. Through this lens, he examines how hidden ideas and beliefs seep into worldbuilding – from dangerous ideologies to artificial lifestyles. Al-Sabah uses the imagined world to rethink what is possible and explores fantasy as a tool for survival rather than escape.
Blending fiction and non-fiction throughout her work, multimedia artist Nina Davies invites audiences to see the world in new ways. Since July 2024, Davies has collaborated with three young people from the Liverpool City Region – Eve, Luke, and Mel – who access the support of the Teenage and Young Adult Team at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre NHS Foundation Trust. Together, they created MEET ME IN THE DIGITAL TWIN (2025), a new artwork exploring the complex and confusing experiences of being a young person living with and beyond cancer.
A digital twin, used by architects when designing The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre’s flagship hospital to virtually model, monitor and improve the building’s functions, became the focus for the group’s creative sci-fi storytelling. Reflecting on their personal experiences, new stories emerged in which Eve, Luke and Mel speculated how future generations migh reinterpret these sites if only their virtual replicas survived.
Taking the form of a podcast and film, the work unfolds as an investigative documentary, with Davies taking on the role of podcast co-host, guiding audiences through a story that blurs the lines between reality and imagination. Set in the future in a fictional city, the gallery installation follows the journey of three researchers created and voiced by the participants.
Visitors are invited to venture beyond a radioactive zone to uncover a secret bunker and decipher the purpose of duplicated people, aura-reading machines and an ancient and still active digital twin hidden within. The past resonates in every element of the sci-future that shapes the podcast, film and installation of MEET ME IN THE DIGITAL TWIN, in turn echoing Eve, Luke and Mel’s lived experiences within systems of care and wellbeing.
Maitreyi Maheshwari, Head of Programme at FACT, said:
“The pervasiveness of digital technologies transforms our everyday encounters with people and places into data, drawing us into virtual simulations of reality. These timely new commissions by Bassam and Nina, invite us to consider the slipperiness of these image worlds that can both seduce us and distort perceptions. At their core, they explore how the fantastical can become a means to reclaim bodily agency.
FACT’s collaboration with The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre continues to build on our commitment to creating spaces of imagination and care that bring artists and young people together. Through these long-term projects, FACT aims to transform lived experience into new forms of knowledge, amplifying voices and exploring how art can shape both wellbeing and the systems that surround it.”
Sam Wade, Arts Coordinator at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre NHS Foundation Trust, said:
“Eve, Luke, and Mel have expressed that the project provided them with opportunities to explore their thoughts and feelings about their own cancer experiences.
They were at the forefront of developing the work alongside artist Nina, incorporating their personal stories. The project has offered them continued support following their treatment, helping to build confidence and allowing them to have fun with their peers. They often expressed that the sessions were the highlight of their week. Working alongside FACT, we have created a space where the young people feel listened to, empowered to share their knowledge, and encouraged to collaborate, connect, use their imaginations, and engage in
creative dialogue. It has been amazing to watch the young people grow throughout the course of the project, and wonderful to see their ideas come to life.”
Categories: 2025 | Galleries & Exhibitions
