Al- Sabah produced a series of stills from the film “IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS”, an ambitious 30-minute-long CGI film featuring ever-changing cinematic sequences from an imaginary video game which follows the ambiguous “hero” undergoing numerous metamorphoses. Combining fantasy, erotica and body horror, the film unravels and challenges the amped-up constructed masculinity that video game avatars embody as well as the associated idealistic connotations of progress, growth and transformation. Here external worlds merge with internal ones, the body’s selfhood untangles from the surface and emotions flood in technicolour form.

Bassam Al-Sabah uses digital animation, painting, sculpture and textiles to convey intricate visions of war, resistance and perseverance, and to explore themes such as displacement, nostalgia and personal mythology. His work references Japanese anime cartoons, which were dubbed into Arabic and broadcast throughout the Middle East from the 1980s to the present day.

Clancy’s new edition is part of a new, ongoing series of prints that explore ideas of the gendered body and its relationship to place, motherhood and materiality. The prints emerge out of an intensive notebook practice where bodily fragments appear, merge and become activated through the process of making.

Majella Clancy is an artist based in Belfast. In 2012 she completed a practice-led PhD that examined ideas of gendered space through paint and print practice at Ulster University.

Gaffney created a series of medium format photographs that have been developed over the past year as part of a larger body of work reflecting on the restorative power of nature alongside the reality of climate change - and resulting climate anxiety - through a fragmented representation of the landscape. The photographs engage a quiet register to examine the subject and are shot throughout Ulster: on Rathlin Island and at Lough Sheelin and its adjoining bog in Cavan. Developed with the support of funding from Platform 31, the University of Atypical and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Caoimhín Gaffney is an artist and filmmaker, based between Belfast and Cavan, whose work has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally.

Gerrard produced a new variable edition of 12 works titled, Testing/testing. Lines, Pins, Circles, especially commissioned for UPHOLD. Gerrard selected three recent drawings; a Woman’s Day protest in Chicago, A Brexit protest in London and an Abortion Rights rally in Poland and has made prints of these. Each of the 12 works have separate elements added to it including, hand painted circles, taped lines, stationary stickers, and tiny pins. The prints are experimental, both serious and playful. The graphic additions transform the ink drawings in different ways, potentially prompting us to consider data, mapping and how we receive and consider images consumed through the media.

Joy Gerrard lives and works in Belfast. She graduated with a BA from NCAD, Dublin and an MA and MPhil from the Royal College of Art, London. Gerrard is known for work that investigates different systems of relations between crowds, architecture and the built environment.

Ailbhe’s work centres around subjects of Migration, Empathy and The Impossible View. The Light Beautiful (I) was originally commissioned by Curator Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes for the international group exhibition ‘Wilde Art’, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, 2014. This exhibition was convened to mark the 160th Birthday of Oscar Wilde. Both The Light Beautiful, and Ailbhe’s accompanying academic paper, examine the aesthetic theories towards social change put forward in Oscar Wilde’s American lecture ‘The House Beautiful’ and ‘The Decoration of Houses’.

Ailbhe Greaney is an artist and academic. She is one of the founding members of the Belfast School of Art BA (Hons) and MFA Photography Degree Programme.