you are in heaven but suddenly everything begins to burn is the title of a new exhibition by artist Bassam Issa Al-Sabah. The project conjures a bleak speculative future, brought to life through video, sculptural and olfactory installation. The narrative within Al-Sabah’s work foretells an inescapable dystopia, built on the ruins of capitalism amid total ecological collapse. This desolate world leaks from the digital realm back into our present-day bodies through the molecules of a perfume, the pixels of an image and the decibels of a soundscape. 

The Exhibitionstages a speculative afterworld in which the aesthetic language of luxury survives long after the material conditions that produced it have collapsed. The exhibition unfolds across video, sculpture, and scent, constructing a dystopian ecology that feels both imminent and eerily familiar. At its core is a video work structured like a perfume advertisement , glossy, seductive, slow-moving , set in a post-apocalyptic landscape.

The visual grammar borrows from high-fashion campaigns, lingering close-ups, hyper-sensory textures, disembodied gestures, aspirational ambiguity. But here, the fantasy is corrupted. The world being sold no longer exists. Capitalism’s promise of transcendence through consumption persists even after ecological ruin. The ad no longer markets a product so much as it markets denial , a final attempt to aestheticize extinction.

This immaterial seduction is countered by the stark sculptural installation: horse legs and a human hand draped limply over a rock. The horse historically bound to conquest, labour, nobility, and myth, appears fragmented, reduced to limbs. The gesture of the hand suggests exhaustion, surrender, or even a failed attempt to rise. Together, the forms evoke both classical ruin and battlefield aftermath. They read like relics of a species that believed itself untouchable.

The perfume ad aspires upward, transcendence, heaven, elevation. The sculpture lies grounded, inert, severed. The exhibition’s title promises paradise only to revoke it instantly. Heaven burns. The fantasy combusts.

The sound by Jack Colleran further complicates the atmosphere. If the decibels of the soundscape vibrate through the body while scent infiltrates the lungs, the viewer is no longer just a spectator but a participant in this speculative ruin. The work collapses distance between screen and flesh. What appears digital becomes somatic.

The scent at the centre of this exhibition was developed during a perfume workshop as part of a Micro Residency at Cow House Studios, convened by the artist in collaboration with Kunstverein Aughrim in May 2024.