Basim Magdy. It All Started With a Map and a Picture of Scattered Little Houses

Project Space, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art

Basim Magdy works in painting, drawing, text, photography and film. His ephemeral narratives blur fictional and real stories of lived and imagined experiences. These trace the cyclical processes of desire and disappointment in humanity’s attempts at reshaping societies systems and structures.

It All Started With a Map and a Picture of Scattered Little Houses presents four videos made between 2012 and 2016: No Shooting Stars (2016)*, The Everyday Ritual of Solitude Hatching Monkeys (2014), The Dent (2014), and Time Laughs Back at You Like a Sunken Ship (2012). These films are lucid and dreamlike visually in their exploration of solitude and collective will. Lyrical and poetic narratives unravel the reciprocity between human relationships, utopian visions, time, perception and memory.

Playing with the materiality of film and the transition from analogue to digital, Magdy addresses, through multiple lenses, the reconciliation of tradition and ritual as we move towards futuristic, industrialized tendencies of existence universally. For this project at Mathaf, the artist and curator experiment with ways of reading and sharing time based work, highlighting the possibility of this medium to articulate the urgencies of our contemporary condition.

*No Shooting Stars (2016) will be shown from 13 June 2017.