Sample-Studios are delighted to present House of Memory / بيت الذاكرة , a solo exhibition by Basil Al-Rawi, in conjunction with the 3rd Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland in partnership with UCC Department of Digital Humanities (22 April 2026).
House of Memory / بيت الذاكرة brings together a constellation of works exploring how personal and collective histories are carried, mediated, and re-encountered through image, voice, and lived experience. Emerging from the Iraq Photo Archive, a crowdsourced online archive of photographs and memories contributed by Iraqi diaspora worldwide, the exhibition considers memory as something continually formed through acts of recollection, mediation, and relation.
At its centre, a virtual reality experience reconstructs personal photographic moments from archive contributors, where image and memory converge as immersive environments that extend the moment beyond the frame. On a small television, a film shaped by contributor testimonies re-mediates image and voice, reflecting on how such technologies have historically shaped and reduced representations of Iraq. Alongside this, the film The Salmon Leapt Towards Babel offers a poetic meditation on personal archive, linguistic displacement, and dual identity.
About the artist
Basil Al-Rawi is an Irish-Iraqi multidisciplinary artist working with photography, moving image, sculpture, and immersive technologies. His practice is concerned with the landscapes of personal and cultural memory, identity, and the digital mediation of reality. Remediation, reconstruction, intervention, and participation are central to his processes. His recent work explores the potential of recomposing archival material to form virtual bonds with the past and create expanded photographic moments.
In 2025 he received the inaugural prestigious Gibson Travelling Fellowship Award from Crawford Art Gallery and the LHQ Impact Award from Cork County Council.
His work is currently supported through bursary funding from the Arts Council of Ireland.