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.