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This two-part program puts the weird, dark, supernatural, and fantastical at center stage.
It looks at how these often under-explored modes of the strange narrate complex historical, geopolitical, and socio-cultural realities, while opening an imaginary world of speculation and possibility. Through the enchanted otherworldliness of the spirit world, expanding universes, understated dread, and the coming to life of that what should remain petrified, these films not only mash up conceptions of time and space, but also blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman, life and nonlife.
The works in the program travel through colonial pasts, extractivist presents, and improbable futures, rendering time and geography fluid and haunted. Landscapes, in the form of forests, waterways, deserts and mountains, become animate. While there is always a suggestion of looming catastrophe and implied violence lurking underneath, there is also an immense sense of potential. A grain of sand slumbers in the mountain’s belly, patiently waiting to transform into something else.
By drawing on folklore, mythology, science, and the intricate entanglements between deep geological time and human historical time, these artists and filmmakers address topical issues such as dispossession, migration, protracted political, and resource extraction. Here dead matter morphs into live matter, ghosts slip into reverie, disquiet awakens desire, and fabulation destabilizes rigid belief systems.
Curated by Nat Muller
Turtles All the Way Down, Basim Magdy, Super 8 film and DV on DVD, 2009, 10 min.
English
Synopsis: Turtles All the Way Down is a narrative constructed from different stories that intertwine debated fictional belief and documented scientific accomplishment. The video starts with the retelling of a story that most famously appeared as the first paragraph in physicist Stephen Hawking’s book “A Brief History of Time”. The story describes a debate between a scientist and an old lady about the nature of the universe. The debate ends with the old lady claiming that the world is a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise. When asked “And what is the tortoise standing on?” She responded, “It’s turtles all the way down”. Moving on, in the next chapter, to Edwin Hubble’s milestone discovery that the universe is expanding, followed by the story of The Great Moon Hoax as published in the New York Sun in 1835. The film ends with the artist proposing the initiation of a cosmic search for what he called the “Super Universal Fossil”; a sponge-like meteorite, that would carry the genetic code of the universe.
Basim Magdy is an artist and a filmmaker. His work appeared recently in solo exhibitions at Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg; M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; MAAT Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; MCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MAXXI, Rome; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux; Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin; Arnolfini, Bristol and in group shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Castello di Rivoli, Torino, New Museum Triennial, New York; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; La Biennale de Montreal, Montreal; MEDIACITY Seoul Biennial; 13th Istanbul Biennial; Sharjah Biennial 11; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
Portrait: © Jens Koch
- Year2009
- Runtime10 minutes
- LanguageEnglish
- DirectorBasim Magdy
This two-part program puts the weird, dark, supernatural, and fantastical at center stage.
It looks at how these often under-explored modes of the strange narrate complex historical, geopolitical, and socio-cultural realities, while opening an imaginary world of speculation and possibility. Through the enchanted otherworldliness of the spirit world, expanding universes, understated dread, and the coming to life of that what should remain petrified, these films not only mash up conceptions of time and space, but also blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman, life and nonlife.
The works in the program travel through colonial pasts, extractivist presents, and improbable futures, rendering time and geography fluid and haunted. Landscapes, in the form of forests, waterways, deserts and mountains, become animate. While there is always a suggestion of looming catastrophe and implied violence lurking underneath, there is also an immense sense of potential. A grain of sand slumbers in the mountain’s belly, patiently waiting to transform into something else.
By drawing on folklore, mythology, science, and the intricate entanglements between deep geological time and human historical time, these artists and filmmakers address topical issues such as dispossession, migration, protracted political, and resource extraction. Here dead matter morphs into live matter, ghosts slip into reverie, disquiet awakens desire, and fabulation destabilizes rigid belief systems.
Curated by Nat Muller
Turtles All the Way Down, Basim Magdy, Super 8 film and DV on DVD, 2009, 10 min.
English
Synopsis: Turtles All the Way Down is a narrative constructed from different stories that intertwine debated fictional belief and documented scientific accomplishment. The video starts with the retelling of a story that most famously appeared as the first paragraph in physicist Stephen Hawking’s book “A Brief History of Time”. The story describes a debate between a scientist and an old lady about the nature of the universe. The debate ends with the old lady claiming that the world is a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise. When asked “And what is the tortoise standing on?” She responded, “It’s turtles all the way down”. Moving on, in the next chapter, to Edwin Hubble’s milestone discovery that the universe is expanding, followed by the story of The Great Moon Hoax as published in the New York Sun in 1835. The film ends with the artist proposing the initiation of a cosmic search for what he called the “Super Universal Fossil”; a sponge-like meteorite, that would carry the genetic code of the universe.
Basim Magdy is an artist and a filmmaker. His work appeared recently in solo exhibitions at Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg; M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; MAAT Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; MCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MAXXI, Rome; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux; Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin; Arnolfini, Bristol and in group shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Castello di Rivoli, Torino, New Museum Triennial, New York; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; La Biennale de Montreal, Montreal; MEDIACITY Seoul Biennial; 13th Istanbul Biennial; Sharjah Biennial 11; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
Portrait: © Jens Koch
- Year2009
- Runtime10 minutes
- LanguageEnglish
- DirectorBasim Magdy