THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT! unfolds as an environment in which film, sculpture, images and shifting light generate a space that never fully settles. The film at the center refuses narrative altogether; it slips instead through avatars, performative fragments, and unstable landscapes, moving like a fever dream through the collapsing architecture of late capitalism. What appears on screen is less a cast of characters than a set of iterations: voices and bodies that shift, merge, and disintegrate as though trying to keep up with the constant demand for reinvention. Adaptation here is no heroic act of change; it is a form of maintenance, an exhausting loop of re-calibration in a world that consumes every gesture as soon as it appears. Within these flickering figures there is a strange pull toward erasure, a soft eroticism rooted not in excess but in disappearance. The film lingers on the comfort of losing shape, of slipping under the gaze that demands performance and finding, in that dissolution, a kind of relief, a moment where the pressure to articulate, to present, to survive visibility simply falls away.

The large polystyrene sculptures echo classical forms but arrive twisted, fragmented, and unsteady. Limbs flex against nothing, torsos arch toward one another without touching, heads lean together in ambiguous, almost conspiratorial poses. A horse’s head fixes its gaze on the viewer, creating a quiet circuit of mutual observation: you watch the film, the sculpture watches you. These works take the language of monumentality; the ideals, the fantasies, the iconographic power structures of the past, and reveal how easily they collapse into aesthetics, into pure surface. They exaggerate the classical body into something carnivorous and hollow, exposing how even the grandest ideologies can be reduced to stylized fantasies, endlessly circulated and endlessly emptied out. Their fractured sensuality mirrors a world where bodies function as interfaces, screens, and commodities. Objects to be viewed, manipulated, or consumed, stripped of solidity and reassembled as spectacle.

The shifting light binds the space together, pulsing with the film’s rhythm so that the room seems to inhale and exhale. Nothing stays still; the atmosphere is one of constant exposure, as if the space itself were performing. The exhibition becomes a loop of visibility in which every form, human, sculptural, digital, appears momentarily before dissolving again, caught in a cycle of being rendered, erased, and re-rendered.

Throughout the work runs a critique of authenticity and its collapse under the pressures of commodification. In this environment, the idea of the “real” becomes difficult to hold onto. Everything is projected, circulated, branded; emotion becomes content, transformation becomes obligation, intimacy becomes another kind of visibility. The figures in the film shift shape not to reveal something deeper but to keep up, and the sculptures echo this instability, caught between grandeur and decay. Transformation no longer carries the promise of liberation, it becomes another demand, another performance, another cycle of exhaustion. The repetition of forms, the strain of constant adaptation, and the collapse of any fixed meaning create a world in which the desire to stop performing becomes its own quiet refrain.

Toward the end, the film and sculptures begin to dissolve into each other—the images thinning, the forms softening, the light pulling everything toward a kind of gentle blur. Nothing concludes; things just drift apart. In that drifting, the work finds a different register, quieter and less certain, where meaning isn’t forced but allowed to fade at its own pace. The exhibition closes not with collapse, but with a slow exhale, leaving the viewer in a space where things can remain unfinished without needing to disappear entirely.

Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT! (2025). Installation views at FACT Liverpool. Photography by Rob Battersby