Basim Magdy’s third solo show at artSümer, An Escalator Descending Towards Mysterious Time Machines is an invitation to look at the future through a crystal ball, observe the present from the bottom of the ocean, and consider a different retelling of history.
Magdy is showing two films on rotation as well as a selection from his new photographic series Someone tried to lock up time. Referencing historical events, the combination of images and text is the artist’s attempt to carve out a place to retell history in a fictional way. By creating new stories, Magdy proposes an open-ended reading of existing material and hints at the cyclical nature of events that are seemingly new for each generation. Presented on a color-graded wall, the installation hints at submersion, a thematic connecting tissue that runs throughout the exhibition. Using different kinds of film stock, and a method for developing film that he calls “pickling” –in which different kinds of acidic household chemicals produce new color combinations as calculated accidents– the artist produces a recycled reality that is familiar yet different. The same process was used for his film No Shooting Stars, in which the protagonist is the ocean, but the narrator a slippery combination of differing viewpoints. A source of fear as well as wonder, the ocean is home to creatures known and unknown. In the film, the ocean is conjured by an ever-shifting narrator, deepening this reservoir for mythmaking. Magdy creates a psychological space, where feelings intensify but thoughts and images remain as evasive as they would in a dream. No Shooting Stars is followed by Crystal Ball. Here, the film is not pickled, but a light leak in the camera that the artist shot with again allows the element of the accidental into his work. Standing as the only black and white film Magdy made, it presents a counter stance with its hazy imagery, asking the viewer to look into the future with their eyes closed. The mundane and unrelated footage is collaged together; disparate images refuse to cohere, precisely as they do in reality. The reverberating sound of the submarine sonar hints at the presence of the ocean surreptitiously while time folds in on itself, like an aural subconscious. Presented together, the two films act as counter images of the artist’s visual essay form, and illustrate the range of Magdy’s narrative and non-narrative output.
In this exhibition, the artist asks the viewer to suspend disbelief, and enter his world of fiction in his typical fashion. Here, oscillating between disenchantment with failed utopian ideas, tinted by the nostalgia of looking at childhood pictures in family albums while maintaining a cool dispassion for the zealous production of humankind and its ruins, we are simultaneously discombobulated and mesmerized by the visual and linguistic puzzles he puts before us. We take the escalator with Magdy and go under water for a cyclical journey through his films and photographs, in order to occupy the past, the present and the future all at once.
Text by: Duygu Demir
