Basim Magdy: The Stars Were Aligned for a Century of New Beginnings, 29 Apr 2016 — 03 Jul 2016
Exhibitions

Basim Magdy: The Stars Were Aligned for a Century of New Beginnings

We live, as the science fiction writer William Gibson puts it, in a culture addicted to the future. No matter whether it looks like a hightech paradise or a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the future is always the setting for a new beginning. At first glance, the title of Magdy’s »Artist of the Year« 2016 exhibition at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle seems to fit into this scheme: »The Stars Were Aligned for a Century of New Beginnings.« But the exact opposite is the case. It is an ironic allusion to humanity, which untiringly makes the same mistakes. All of the nameless and bodiless protagonists of Magdy’s films and the survivors who explore futuristic buildings in his works on paper are forced to reenact their history again and again. The societies he portrays in his 2014 filmtrilogy »The Many Colors of the Sky Radiate Forgetfulness,« »The Everyday Ritual of Solitude Hatching Monkeys,« and »The Dent« are bankrupt, entangled in absurd rituals of preserving the past or megalomaniac projects. His installation »In the Grave of Intergalactic Utopia« (2006) in the studio of the KunstHalle is a swan song of dreams of reaching the stars and the space race in the postwar era. The journey ends with a slapstick-like crash landing.

The artist, who was born in Egypt in 1977 and now lives in Basel and Cairo, uses the future as an opportunity to take a critical look at the present. He has repeatedly emphasized that utopias do not work because they have nothing to do with the reality of the present in which they are developed. Full of absurd humor, Basim Magdy’s art confronts us with things we often repress: the uncertain, the uncontrollable. Magdy counters our striving for binding truth, a lasting state, with unpredictable experiments with chemical reactions, striking a balance between chance and control. The »pickling« stresses the process-oriented approach in his work. This also applies to the work commissioned for the exhibition, a new 64-part grid of text layered photographic works, for which he used this method. It illustrates the alchemical »development« of narration and themes, reaction and counter-reaction. At the same time, Magdy always reflects on the circulation of images and information and the fluid boundaries between reality and virtuality in the digital age. In his work, he radically questions the way in which we archive and pass on memories in order to shape our own future. As an alternative, Magdy looks for new more open structures in his art that liberate themselves from old hierarchies and ideologies. The way he combines text and images, his poetic manner of writing and the absurdity inherent in most of his works speak of a more unbiased, individual perspective on reality. This thinking is also manifested in the choreography of the exhibition, which dispenses with a chronological order or a hierarchy of certain media. Magdy’s fleeting narratives ask us to think laterally, to accept contradictions, and to open ourselves to the here and now without viewing reality dogmatically.

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