Basim Magdy: Measuring the Last Breaths of Time on a Fading Scale

In Basim Magdy’s work we are subjected to the world through a satirical eye. His drawings, sculptures, films and installations are conceived with a taste for the absurd. They build a universe that has gone off-kilter. Like dreams, elements of a familiar landscape stem out of reality. Past, present and future exist as a single realm and depictions—often of foliage and ruins, astronauts and rockets, airplanes, soldiers, cranes and modernist structures—take on a surreal aggressive quality. 

Despite a preoccupation with analogue film, narrative sequences are seldom linear. Fragments, gaps, and clues suggest rather than tell a story. His films, in particular, progress like a series of still images permeated with a haunted air that heightens our sense of suspense. Magdy stretches the boundaries of our imagination to test the logic of the truth, which often lies somewhere between reality and fiction. 

For his first exhibition at Gypsum Gallery, Magdy shows Time Laughs Back at You Like a Sunken Ship (2012), a short film shot on Super 8, alongside a new suite of chromogenic color prints produced from chemically altered slides. Nature, as a state that occurs in the wild and a force that has been harnessed and cultivated throughout civilization, features in both works and becomes a witness to the inevitable passing of time.