To be spat back out | Group Exhibition at GOMA Waterford

Event Details

To be spat back out

Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, Jennifer Mehigan and Caoimhín Gaffney

Officially launch at GOMA Waterford on Saturday 26 July, 4–6pm. All are welcome to attend.

To be spat back out is a three-person exhibition by Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, Jennifer Mehigan and Caoimhín Gaffney, where individual and collaborative practices overlap and interact across world building (fiction and CGI), world destroying (climate change) and worlds colliding (queer networks, and traumatic experiences that interrupt the present as spectres). Emerging out of their conversations and exchange of skills across the various technologies in their work, the images, objects, and animations they produce are often oriented towards the presentation of climate change in the media, with each artist exploring how ideas of ‘nature’ can be re-examined from a postcolonial and queer perspective.

To be spat back out revels in waste and excess, examining the expressions of excessive emotions as a queer strategy of resistance. Through storytelling, images and texts, reality bends to a breaking point; mirroring how trauma distorts, remakes and retells lived experience in its own image. The legacy of colonialism is examined as a material component of the climate crisis, and how the binary dynamics of indoor/outdoor and private/public spaces fail to imagine what is possible in the present.

Situated in relation to their practices, the exhibition employs non-linear storytelling, poetry, surreality, virtual reality, and daydreaming, growing into a new unpredictable formation as a collective body of work.

The exhibition will run from Saturday 26 July – Saturday 23 August 2025.

GOMA Gallery is open Tuesday–Saturday, 11am–5pm. Free entry, all welcome.

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Biographies

Bassam Issa Al-Sabah is a visual artist working with digital animation, painting, sculpture and textiles. often building installations that interrogate the intersection of fantasy and trauma, employing speculative worlds as a lens through which to explore the mechanisms of memory and identity formation. Frequently drawing on the visual lexicon of video games, anime, and popular culture, constructing alternative realities that function as both a means of escape and critical commentary.

Bassam Issa Al-Sabah works across digital animation, painting, sculpture, and textiles. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at FACT (2025) Transmediale (2024) The DHG (2022-24) Solstice Arts Centre (2019), the LAB (2018) and with the Glucksman as an offsite installation (2021). Group exhibitions include Golden Thread Gallery (2020), the Dock (2021), Queer Embodiment and Social Fabric at IMMA (2021-2022) and Futures at the RHA (2018). His work has also been shown internationally, including solo exhibitions at Gasworks (London, 2021) and the De La Warr Pavillion (UK, 2022), and group exhibitions and screenings at Transmediale (Berlin, 2021), EX-IS (South Korea, 2021), Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2021) and the Barbican (London, 2022).

Caoimhín Gaffney is an artist, filmmaker and writer, whose work has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally. Gaffney’s practice comprises of film, analogue photography, writing and installation to allow for a cross-pollination of ideas between the works. Solo exhibitions include the Crawford Art Gallery, Block 336 in London, Contemporary Art Institute (CAI02) in Sapporo, and a touring exhibition of new work from the Butler Gallery to the Highlanes Gallery and Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre during 2024-2025. Their films have screened at FACT, Cork Film Festival, Korean Queer Film Festival, the European Media Arts Festival and the London Short Film Festival (receiving the Little White Lies award).

Gaffney graduated from the Royal College of Art’s MA Photography and Moving Image with distinction in 2011 and received their PhD from Ulster University’s School of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences in 2022. In 2014, they were an UNESCO-Aschberg laureate artist-in-residence at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Changdong residency in South Korea, and in 2015 received a Sky Arts scholarship. Their work is featured in the collections of the Arts Council, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Crawford Art Gallery.

Jennifer Mehigan
Using paint, inkjet, neural networks, her garden and her phone, Jennifer Mehigan’s prints and paintings blend new and old methods of making and processing the world – a relationship the artist views as a ‘strained mother-daughter’ dynamic. Mehigan’s wider practice also incorporates sculpture, filmmaking, perfumery, writing, parties, workshops, and flower farming, deploying sensory experience to explore the awkwardness of making images as they are overproduced and harvested. Her work occupies a space where pop culture, painterly gestures, digital materiality, autobiography, “public feelings” (after Ann Cvetkovich) and self-help literature can interact, allowing her to investigate, often through a non-human lens, how power manifests in the world.

Mehigan’s research focuses largely on closed systems and “defaults,” beginning with the computer and extending through domestic and public environments. Through this framework, she investigates themes of submission, withholding, oversharing, and the right to remain illegible—borrowing from GDPR legislation. Her work is particularly informed by omissions and misunderstandings of women’s contributions to horticulture and agriculture, examining the tension between excess and absence as it manifests within various enclosures, namely the field, the map, the screen and the picture frame.

Previously based in Singapore and Belfast, she now lives and works in the Slieve Felim mountains in Co. Limerick.

To be spat back out runs at GOMA Waterford from 26 July – 23 August 2025. All welcome!