ART CITIES:Berlin -Basim Magdy
In his work Basim Magdy uses video, painting, slide projection and installation to examine war, information systems, scientific theories and the visual vocabulary of mass media. Positioning notions of progress within systems of humor and doubt, his work is marked by paradox and shifts between demolition and renewal, ruins and reconstruction.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Deutsche Bank KunstHalle Archive
Basim Magdy in first institutional solo exhibition “The Stars Were Aligned for a Century of New Beginnings”, invites visitors to take a journey into the future, he is primarily concerned with the present, presenting films, slide projections, photographs, works on paper, and installations from 2006 to 2016 combined into a stream of images that reflects the fluid boundaries between reality and virtuality. The title of the exhibition may sounds optimistic, but Basim Magdy plays ironically and humorously with the constantly changing cycle of hopes, utopias, and defeats. The societies he portrays in his 2014 film trilogy “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. In addition to Basim Magdy’s significant film trilogy, his large-scale 64-part photographic work “An Apology of a Love Story that Crashed into a Whale” is at the center of the exhibition. Commissioned for the show, the work impressively illustrates Magdy’s handling of photography and text. This essence is also found in one of his most well-known works, the installation “A 240 Second Analysis of Failure and Hopefulness (with Coke, Vinegar and other Tear Gas Remedies)”. The double projection with 160 slides shows different stages at a large unidentified construction site in a city, the razing of the old building structures and the construction of the new building. But Magdy manipulated the slides of diggers, cranes, and construction work with unusual means such as Coca-Cola or vinegar, laying the films in them. The chemical reaction not only colors the material in nostalgically blurred cyan, pink or green. The substances also serve as a remedy against tear gas,an allusion to the recurring cycles of collective aspiration, action and defeat that have been manifesting themselves throughout history. “The Future of Your Head” (2008), is a sculpture incorporating a two-way mirror with a message formed out of sparkling Christmas lights, suggests that we can leave behind our self-reflective, causal thinking and our anthropocentric worldview.
Info: Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Unter den Linden 13 / 15, Berlin, Duration: 29/4-3/7/16, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-20:00, www.deutsche-bank-kunsthalle.de
