The Relentless Repetition of Reality

About

Basim Magdy's work analyses contemporary representational regimes. His films, photographs and paintings create fluid environments, challenging the stable understanding of these concepts. The dreamlike tonality of his work, emerging out of the layered juxtapositions of time and space, is combined with the oniric features of his soundscapes and with the manipulations imposed onto still and moving images.

Resorting to filters, chemical emulations and layered framing, his images present a wide range of colours, effects and textures of kaleidoscopic like quality. Similar to a hallucinogenic experience, these uncanny effects echo and reframe the utopian dreams of modernism by establishing what Lars Bang Larsen describes as an intimate relation with time and space that is yet unformed.

Contrary to crystallised readings of psychedelia as a movement towards evasion, Magdy’s kaleidoscopic visions propose and enact ephemeral forms and strange temporalities that bridge subjective impulses with social space, reaching for ways to re-imagine life’s positioning in history.