What if we wake up one morning and gravity is gradually increasing? Made pre-pandemic, Basim Magdy’s most recent super-16mm film M.A.G.N.E.T. (2019) imagines a fantastical world not too far from the one we are currently living in, though just as catastrophic. While the mock disaster that struck is of a slightly different kind than the one(s) we are facing, M.A.G.N.E.T. dwells on questions just as pertinent, asking among others, what adapting to a completely new life could mean for humankind as things weigh heavier and heavier each day. In addition to this rumination on forces that surround us and the desire to make sense of this chaos, the artist is also showing polaroids and paintings in his fourth solo exhibition at artSümer, titled “A Dot in a Pool of Broken Sound Waves.” In his signature blend of subdued absurdist narrative, the idiosyncratic technicolor universe of pickled film, and what seems to be a growing interest in retro-fitted science-fiction, Magdy presents a palatable disaster scenario, while maintaining the mystery around its timing: are we diving into the distant past, projecting into the future, or merely looking in the mirror? Decide for yourself after seeing the show.
Basim, I think you are the ultimate collage-artist. You put together sound, image and text that is originally unrelated, and voilà, there is a different world, a different feeling, a different sense of time. You mine reality for this; the images, sounds, and ideas in the text all come from daily life. But it is as if whatever absurd thing gets edited out of the rational flow finds its way into your work. Can we perhaps say that your work is an attempt to bring this very crucial element back and re-insert it into our circuitry?
It was probably 10 years ago when I started developing a level of sensitivity towards noticing the many layers of absurdity and unexpectedness in my daily life. I became obsessed with connecting the dots and trying to understand the strategies we use to edit out the absurd connections that construct our realities, just for the sake of making sense of it. The way people meet and fall in love, the way a car accident happens, the way success is achieved from endless failures, the way the First World War started and took the lives of 20 million people, and the way mythology and prejudice are merely conceived out of fear and ignorance, or just wishful thinking are all examples of how historically speaking, absurdity was eliminated instead of embraced. Words like fate, luck and misfortune are used to explain our lack of ability to make sense of what surrounds us. I started to gradually embrace absurdity in the making of my films too: not everything had to be synced, even the word combinations that form a sentence started becoming less conventional and more poetic. Subtle humor, irony and sarcasm play a role in this as well. Images and sounds are not meant to constantly follow expectations, even my own. The films started growing in a collage-like manner as you mentioned, like layering bricks made from different materials, of different sizes and shapes, to build a house that looks like any other house.
I think this idiosyncratic blend of sarcasm, irony and humor in constructing a narrative is not limited to your films, I would say that even your photography was rather film-like, in that you often pair an image with a text; they are like subtitled film stills. The interplay between text and image has taken other forms in your work too, as in the gridded wall-installations in which you combine poetic pronouncements with your photographs. But now, it seems you are paring down. The polaroids you are showing in this exhibition stand alone, without any text or a sequential organization to prop them. How did you arrive at this simplicity, and why polaroid film?
I feel like the evolution of anyone’s work in any field is a chronology of their own life. I believe that I can always connect the kind of work I made at any point in time to who I was at that point in my life. Between 2004 and 2009, I made elaborate installations with as many layers as I could squeeze into them; I was interested in creating environments that told stories. They played with expectations, common knowledge, mythology, space exploration and they were based on everything from conspiracy theories, pseudo-science and cryptozoology. The installations were layered with text, props, sound, video, scents, and living organisms; I even integrated changes in temperature to the work. As I discovered my interest in filmmaking, and started treating film as a tangible material, my interest in photography grew. My work changed gradually and, over time, drastically. Throughout this journey, one of the things that constantly evolved but stayed with me was my attempt to analyze the role of absurdity in my daily encounters and thoughts, and my desire to explore different ways of constructing narratives with it. Text appeared as a crucial element once I figured out a way to write in –what I like to believe is– a poetic manner, which mostly involves finding unusual word combinations to deliver meaning. But text played different roles in my films, which is a time-based medium where the narrative flows and any line of text is only momentarily visible, before it is replaced by another line. In the large photographic grids embedded with lines of text, the strategy changed. There, I wanted people to experience the narrative as a whole, to create their own order of events and sequence of images.
Along with my interest in film came an interest in the analog technology with which reality can be represented in an altered state. I bought a Polaroid Polaprinter, a slide copier that was made in the 1980s to print any color or black and white slide onto a polaroid. I wanted to stretch it beyond its initial purpose so I started printing collaged elements onto polaroids using slides, transparencies, color filters and semi-transparent objects that I would wedge inside a glass mount, like 16mm or super 8 film strips, plant leaves or copper sulfate crystals that I was growing at the time. The polaroids became a way to discover new potential within analog image-making, but also a humbler yet meaningful way of finding new joys in converting ideas into artworks, which runs parallel to the filmmaking, photography, text works and of course, painting. For me the polaroids are exercises in composition, layering and expanding the medium of photography, or maybe they’re more like what Bruce Jenkins once described them: “painting by other means.”
I guess in a way I hope that this multiplicity in working with mediums and tools somehow reflects who I am at this point in my life.
I was just going to say, another very analog technology for image-making would be painting. And you yourself recently returned to painting, where the initial root of your artistic training also lies. Could you talk about your very first engagement with painting, and why you decided to paint again? I think it is part of a larger tendency in this current moment, not just for artists but all humans, to seek tactility, to have more haptic experiences. This, of course, has something to do with how much everything has migrated to screens, to life on the “meta-verse.” But I don’t necessarily think of this as a reactionary tendency. What do you think?
From a very practical point of view, when the pandemic started and exhibitions were put on hold, travel stopped, and the endless flow of work deadlines dissipated. I looked at the blank canvases that had been staring back at me in my studio for years, waiting for something to happen, and I realized it was time to paint. Painting requires focus and a daily rhythm to respond to the complex physics of time: when paint dries or how not to miss the right moment to add a layer or a figure or a brushstroke. But more importantly, I knew exactly what I missed about painting; it offers a way to create a world from scratch, from absolutely nothing. When I shoot footage for a film or take photographs, there is always something to film or photograph, something real and tangible that I position the lens to capture. Painting defies the reality of the world and presents an alternative, another tool to quench my curiosity about the world as I know it. I don’t think I ever wanted to be just a painter though. I was always looking for something more, something layered that responds better to the simple yet present concept of the passing of time, which is critical to everything I do. With its multiple layers and being time-based itself, film eventually became an ideal tool to explore that. When I returned to painting after having spent years mostly focusing on film and photography in an expanded sense, my new paintings came out different. The way I paint now is informed by the strategies I use in filmmaking. The paintings are layered, physically, but also, although in a different way, I realize that I’m trying to make sense of what I experience at this point in my life, which is very different from when I had stopped painting. The passing of time influences everything.
Your recent paintings seem to me as if they are part and parcel of an inspiration board, or that they are stage-designs for a dystopian science-fiction film. I think I can confidently say that as an artist, your film and photographic work is painterly, while your paintings are film-like. I never personally got to experience the elaborate installations at the beginning of your career that you described earlier, but I imagine there was a set-like feeling to them as well. I think this permeability between different mediums and materials makes your artistic practice very fluid, whereas your interests, though they expand and contract, and somehow alter course over time, stay solid. I find what you are saying about painting’s relationship to time and your return to it fascinating, because I think one of the things that made painting interesting again at the turn of the 20th century was its struggle with time, its competition with time-based media, and attempts of painters to distinguish painting from film and photography. Time and our desire to capture it, compete with it, and live with it seems very central to our existence as humans, and also an existentially productive problem for artists.
This last question is about your latest film that you are showing in this exhibition, which I think manages to both evoke deep-time and humans’ failure to think within that framework although they are aware of it. I also find the film to occupy the present tense; much can be extrapolated from it about our current predicament. But very strangely, or eerily even, you made it before the pandemic. Would you like to say a few words about M.A.G.N.E.T.?
I always say jokingly that one of the biggest advantages of working with different mediums is being able to move swiftly from one to the other whenever my enthusiasm fades. This freedom of movement between mediums is also what allows me to treat each of them singularly. Somehow this fluidity helps me evaluate an idea to decide whether I can find a way to create meaning by laying it bare, exposing all its layers and elements as a photographic grid on a wall, or ordering it as a time-based sequence of fleeting images, sounds and words in a film that reveal itself through the passing of time. But in reality, the way you describe it is exactly what happens. They all inform and influence one another, and even in the paintings, which in my opinion use a different logic, there are always hints of the way I construct films and photography. I think this is somehow evident in the spectrum of colors and the painterly quality of M.A.G.N.E.T.
When I started this film, I was thinking about global warming as the current most imminent danger to our mere existence. I was thinking about the self-centered ignorance of humans and the fact that when astronomers started looking for the possibility of life on other planets, their minds were set on looking for an atmosphere, water and a combination of gases that resemble ours, dismissing the possibility of life existing in forms that are yet to be discovered. I was thinking about history and its repetitive and recurring cycles and every generation’s reluctance to acknowledge its predecessor’s failures and successes. I asked myself, what if something else happened and challenged us in unimaginable ways before global warming hits its peak? And suddenly, an unpredictable and uncontrollable increase in gravity presented itself as the central idea for the film. Reluctant to unlock a stream of pretentious solutions for coping with this new predicament, I decided to focus on constructing a fictional narrative of missed opportunities by assigning main roles to historical artifacts of mysterious origins such as the standing stones in this narrative. The film is layered with characters; there is an unidentified narrator whose gender, occupation as well as name are withheld. There are also a 6-year-old girl with a helium-inflated balloon, sleeping prophets and clairvoyants with flashlights, petrified lovers, a geologist, a decorated military cook and a ship captain on a mission to an island that holds the secret entrance to the center of the earth, and lastly the odorless guards that guard that entrance. Shot with acidic color filters, instead of being about pseudoscientific solutions to a hypothetical problem, I ended up making a film about the immensity of lost knowledge and how human ignorance constantly fuels the predicaments of any status quo.
Written in conversation with the artist on the occasion of A Dot in a Pool of Broken Sound Waves, Basim Magdy’s fourth solo exhibition at artSümer, Istanbul, 2021.