Basim Magdy. ‘A Series of Flickering Dreams’
9 November 2022 — 8 January 2023
- Artists
- Basim Magdy
- Curators
- Carolina Ciuti
- Venue
- Museo Tàpies
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The Fundació Antoni Tàpies hosts a film selection by internationally recognised artist Basim Magdy (Asyut, Egypt, 1977).
What are we left with when we wake up from a dream? Sometimes it is the vivid recollection of what seemed to be an awake experience; some other times it is a tangle of flickering images that persist as an enduring echo. Instinctively, our brains might try to make sense of their meanings, yet they will not always succeed. With time, all that remains is a series of muffled feelings, the distant memory of a hallucination. And in that blurry reverberation your very own interpretation might probably manifest.
The layered films of Magdy often draw inspiration from life to create an altered perception of reality; by juxtaposing images that would normally be associated with different semiotic fields, the artist manages to make even absurd occurrences seem plausible. As shown in the films selected for this show–Crystal Ball (2013), The Dent (2014) and FEARDEATHLOVEDEATH (2022)–our effort of attributing a logic to what we see is immediately swept away by the immersive sensory experience generated by the masterly editing. Sound, especially, becomes a determining factor in creating the feeling of an enveloping ambience and the illusion of a continuous present that captures you until your eyes are wide open again.
As it happens with dreams, it can be said that in Magdy’s work reality blurs with fiction and that the veracity of a vision loses its urgency. What gains importance is, instead, a new horizon of possibility, where past, present and future collapse and a novel interpretation arise. The question is: what is it that you’ll remember once you are awake?
Selected solo exhibitions: Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, M HKA, Antwerp; MAAT Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MAXXI, Rome; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux; Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin; Arnolfini, Bristol. Group exhibitions: MoMA, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Castello di Rivoli, Torino, New Museum Triennial, New York; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; La Biennale de Montreal; MEDIACITY Seoul Biennial; 13th Istanbul Biennial; Sharjah Biennial 11; La Triennale: Intense Proximity, Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
Winner of the Abraaj Art Prize, New:Vision Award, CPH:DOX Film Festival, Copenhagen and the Experimental Award at the Curtas Vila do Conde – International Film Festival, Portugal. He is Deutsche Bank’s 2016 Artist of the Year. Selected screenings include Tate Modern, Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, ICA London.
Carolina Ciuti
1990, Pistoia
Carolina Ciuti is a contemporary art curator and researcher in the fields of visual and performing arts. She holds a BA in History and Preservation of the Artistic Heritage from the University of Florence (2009-2012) and an MA in Contemporary Art from the Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London (2013-2015). During her university training, she collaborated with the Collezione Gori: Fattoria di Celle (Pistoia) and the artists residency Villa Lena (Pisa), being respectively in charge of the educational proposals, the guided tours and the assistance to the director. She currently serves as artistic director of the LOOP video art festival in Barcelona, where she started working in 2015 as a curator. At LOOP, she has produced exhibitions, film programmes and performances by internationally recognised artists such as: Regina de Miguel, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Aleksandra Mir, Muntadas, Steina and Woody Vasulka and Anton Vidokle. She curated the group exhibitions And If Seeing Was Fire (Filmoteca de Catalunya, Barcelona, 2020), One Day I Stumbled Upon A Meteorite (Fabra i Coats – Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona, 2019), PRODUCE, PRODUCE, PRODUCED (Real Cercle Artístic, Barcelona, 2018), the projects Francesca Banchelli: Before The Name (MACBA, Barcelona, 2016) and TRANSEUROPE EXPRESS (OfficeCafè, Pistoia, 2015), as well as the video programmes presented by LOOP at Cinéphèmère-FIAC Paris (editions 2017, 2018, 2019). She edited the publications One Day I Stumbled Upon a Meteorite (exhibition catalogue, stuffinabook, 2020), I Have A Friend Who Knows Someone Who Bought a Video, Once (LOOP Barcelona, Mousse Publishing, 2016) and Before The Name: a book on an itinerant performance project. (RAM Editions, 2018). Ciuti is a permanent collaborator of the magazine of contemporary culture La Maleta de Portbou and she frequently contributes to the art catalogues of the publishing house Istituto Italiano Edizioni ATLAS. In 2017, she co-founded the art collective CRiB to create hybrid projects straddling the visual arts, theatre and performance. Whether through writing, curating, or research, all of Carolina’s projects denote a deep interest in the notion of ‘time’ in all its facets, its representation in the philosophical and cultural sphere, and its influence on the construction of identities.
Last update 3rd October 2020
