Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Nina Davies at FACT

In our increasingly digital world, reality arrives filtered, flattened and fragmented. It’s become so normalised we barely notice – but perhaps we should.

Two free exhibitions by Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Nina Davies explore this unease through speculative storytelling and immersive worldbuilding, asking what’s lost when lived experience is replaced by its digital double.

Bassam Issa Al-Sabah creates surreal, hybrid worlds through digital animation, painting and sculpture, exploring resistance, transformation and queer possibility. His fantastical spaces become both refuge and reckoning. At FACT, Al-Sabah presents 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 its centre, a CGI film follows fantastical figures caught between obedience and self-determination, surrounded by large-scale shattered sculptures suspended between ruin and renewal.

The exhibition probes how online spaces – sold as liberating – can instead flatten and distort the user’s sense of self, shaping how we wish to be seen. Drawing on video game mechanics and digital aesthetics, Al-Sabah’s immersive world questions whether our digital selves have already begun to rewrite who we are, taking in everything from artificial lifestyles to dangerous ideologies. He uses this imagined world to rethink what is possible and explores fantasy as a tool not for escape – but for survival.

This exhibition is paired with the work of multimedia artist Nina Davies, who similarly blends fiction and non-fiction, inviting 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. The group imagined how future generations might reinterpret these sites if only their virtual replicas survived.

Presented as a film and podcast, MEET ME IN THE DIGITAL TWIN unfolds like an investigative documentary, hosted by the artist and featuring the voices of the three participants as imagined researchers. 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.

Through fantasy, both artists reclaim agency within technological and institutional systems that shape how we see ourselves. Together, they suggest that imagination itself might be our most powerful form of resistance.