In BASIM MAGDY’s work we are subjected to the world through a satirical eye. His drawings, sculptures, videos 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.

Magdy’s references abound: they range from the slick veneer of advertising, the sinister tropes of science fiction and comic strip to the documentary style of nature, science and technology shows and the apocalyptic tone of biblical stories. Magdy utilizes an array of classical and unconventional media, from spray paint and colored crayons, to chemically altered film stock, photographs and film footage shot by the artist. The result is an aesthetic sensibility of the spaces he creates that is at once retro and futuristic, existing beyond the confines of time, as we know it.

Despite a preoccupation with analogue film, narrative sequences are seldom linear. Fragments, gaps, and clues suggest rather than tell a story. His videos, in particular, progress like a series of still images permeated with a haunted air that heightens our sense of suspense. In almost all his work, poetic but ambiguous titles add another layer to the narrative. Magdy stretches the boundaries of our imagination to test the logic of the truth which often lies somewhere between reality and fiction.

BASIM MAGDY (b. 1977, Assiut) work uses fictitious pasts and dystopic futures to put forward a critical commentary on the present. Magdy has shown his work in solo exhibitions at M HKA Museum of contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium; MAAT Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MAXXI National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux; Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin; Arnolfini, Bristol; South London Gallery, London; Mathaf, Doha; Art in General, New York; State of Concept, Athens; and University Galleries of Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA.

His work has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Castello di Rivoli, Torino; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; The High Line, New York; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Magdy’s work was included in The New museum Triennial, New York; La Biennale de Montreal, Montreal; Seoul Mediacity Biennial; 13th Istanbul Biennial; Sharjah Biennials11 and 13; La Triennale: Intense Proximity, Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

Magdy was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize, Kiev (2012) and was awarded the Abraaj Art Prize, Dubai (2014); New:Vision Award, CPH:DOX Film Festival, Copenhagen (2014); and the Experimental Award, Curtas Vila do Conde–International Film Festival, Portugal (2015). He was selected as Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year (2016).

His work is in the collections of MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York, Guggenheim, New York, MCA Museum of Contemporary Art and the MoCP Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, as well as Paris’ Centre Pompidou and Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Deutsche Bank Collection, Sharjah Art Foundation, Mathaf: Museum of Modern Arab Art, Doha, ARTER, Istanbul, among others.

Magdy lives and works in Basel.