1, PLACE DE LA CONCORDE, PARIS

Transcription

1 PRESS KIT #BasimMagdy Basim Magdy No Shooting Stars 9th Satellite Programme October 18, 2016 January 15, , PLACE DE LA CONCORDE, PARIS 8 e CONCORDE

2 Partners The exhibition is co-produced by the Jeu de Paume, the FNAGP and the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux. The Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques and Plastiques contributes to producing works from the Satellite events programme. The Friends of CAPC contribute to the production of works in the Satellite programme. The Maison d Art Bernard Anthonioz and the Jeu de Paume are members of Tram and d.c.a, association française de développement des centres d art. Media partners artpress, paris-art.com, Souvenirs from Earth TV And also Exhibition at CAPC musée d art contemporain de Bordeaux from 11/17/2016 to 01/29/2017. The Jeu de Paume receives public funding from the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. It is supported by Neuflize OBC and the Manufacture Jaeger-LeCoultre, its principal partners. Cover: Basim Magdy, No Shooting Stars, Super 16mm and GIF animations transferred to Full HD. Duration: 14 min 25 s. Co-comissioned by Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques and CAPC musée d art contemporain de Bordeaux Courtesy of the artist Basim Magdy,

3 Basim Magdy No Shooting Stars 9th Satellite Programme October 18, 2016 January 15, 2017 Curator HEIDI BALLET Contents TH SATELLITE PROGRAMME: OUR OCEAN, YOUR HORIZON BIOGRAPHY / HEIDI BALLET, INDEPENDENT CURATOR THE EXHIBITION BASIM MAGDY PRESS VISUALS PRACTICAL INFO 3

4 9TH SATELLITE PROGRAMME: OUR OCEAN, YOUR HORIZON A comparison between oceanic and land-based identities, two prisms through which you can see yourself in relation to the world, forms the starting point for the 9th Satellite programme. While land-based identity hinges on an inward-looking worldview that is concerned with finite space demarcated by borders and sovereignty, oceanic identity is radically different. An identity associated with water space entails a fluid, inclusive, expansive, outward-looking perspective that focuses on horizons and what lies beyond them. From this vantage point, selfhood is defined by navigation and movement in a reversal of a static interpretation of space. In traditional Western cartography, water space tends to be considered merely as a lack of land, governed by unruly forces. Looking at the ocean's body of water as real territory, on the contrary, offers an alternative terrain of unified space that is characterized by free navigation, as opposed to land-based territory, which is ruled in an 'orderly' manner by a historically perpetuated logic of defining and policing state borders that gives way to geopolitical tension. Artists Edgardo Aragon, Patrick Bernier & Olive Martin, Guan Xiao and Basim Magdy navigate definitions of the self that are not bound to traditional dichotomies but are hybrid. This series of four solo exhibitions proposes alternative formations that do not adhere to conventional ideas of restrictive cartography. They instead adopt more fluid notions of belonging that propose a different geographic and political imaginary altogether. Heidi Ballet independent curator 4

5 BIOGRAPHY OF HEIDI BALLET, INDEPENDENT CURATOR Jan Zappner Heidi Ballet is an independent curator and researcher from Belgium who is based in Berlin. She is currently preparing a large group exhibition that will open at CAC Vilnius in September Since 2012 she has been working as a research curator at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin for the 2013 exhibition After Year Zero, a traveling exhibition that moved to the Museum for Modern Art, Warsaw, in Other recent exhibitions include the 2015 edition of Brussels Cologne Contemporaries and the group exhibition Let the Body be Electric, Let There be Whistleblowers (co-curated with Anselm Franke) at Dan Gunn gallery in Berlin in Heidi Ballet was the assistant curator of the 2012 Taipei Biennial Modern Monsters/Death and Life of Fiction. From 2008 to 2012 she was director of the Jan Mot gallery in Brussels, where she curated the group exhibition The Encounter in In 2014 she participated in the Fondation d Entreprise Ricard Young Curators Invitational and the Berlin Biennial Young Curators Workshop. She is a member of the board of the KIOSK Gallery in Ghent and of the artistic advisory board of the Contour Biennale in Mechelen. In 2017, Heidi Ballet will curate a large group show at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius. 5

6 THE EXHIBITION Some of Basim Magdy s films could be described as surrealistic visual essays that capture the absorbing space between hollow desires and delusions. They are humorous reflections of scepticism towards utopian states, suspicion of scientific facts and the expectation of dystopian outcomes. The narratives in his films are usually situated at the moment just before the failure of an idealized future becomes apparent. His film The Dent (2014), for example, describes the excitement of a small town that aspires to organise the Olympics. When the prospect of defeat becomes obvious, despite a number of sacrifices made, the town s inhabitants resort to hypnotising a circus. In the film The Everyday Ritual of Solitude Hatching Monkeys (2014), on the other hand, a man calls a random number and explains how he moved to a new place in order to live as far away from water as possible, only to find himself in solitude after everyone in his new community has gone to the beach to never return. Magdy adopts the position of an outsider-spectator, and from this vantage point he is interested in the human impulse of communal myth-making. The storylines in his works expose the aspirations and ideologies that fuel actions geared towards constructing a group s uniqueness, either by exaggerating a foundational tale or, inversely, by creating the idea of a glorious future. This dynamic, which has a tendency to embellish fact with bits of fiction, can serve in the same way as nation state histories or family sagas to emphasise a particularity that justifies exceptions in the present. In Magdy s accounts, the outcome of working towards a loftier goal is almost always met with disappointment once the grand schemes are tested by reality and people are forced to accept the mundane everyday without anything more Basim Magdy No Shooting Stars, 2016 Super 16mm and GIF animations transferred to Full HD. Duration: 14 min 25 s. Co-comissioned by Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques and CAPC musée d art contemporain de Bordeaux Courtesy of the artist Basim Magdy,

7 In "No Shooting Stars", Magdy covers a territory that has no founding legend, namely the vast oceanic space. Water space is present in most religious creation narratives and scientifically is even considered to be the source of life itself. Yet once water s role of life-giver is played out, land-based civilizations attach little or no importance to the oceans. Oceanic territory lays dormant at the margins of our awareness and does not enter into history books since no group has an interest in glorifying it as a home base. On the contrary, psychologically open seas are caught in a land-water dichotomy that makes them the only place of designation for vagabonds and prisoners, thus figuring as a negative counter image for the order that reigns on the land. Magdy s new work is built around the personal narrative of someone whose identity is vested in the ocean, an entity that is willing to unveil the secrets of an underwater world. As the film progresses, images merge and dream-like scenes drift in dissonance with a narration. Some imagery shows what happens underwater, although most images are made up of spaces that are all affected by the ocean s mystery but bring no enlightenment. The narrator s tale meanders like a poem, and intensifies existing feelings rather than offering an explanation that is anticipated, running the story through many loops of imagination. The ocean s surface is relatively known it has been crossed by numerous explorers and cargo ships for many centuries but the depths under the surface have never been mapped out. According to psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the ocean symbolises our unconscious, the bigger part of our brain that we do not control. The voice of the narrator could it be a sea monster, a mermaid or an old sea turtle has an enticing familiarity, but the image that is built of the narrator slips away as soon as it takes shape, reflecting the logic of the unstable ground of water space. In his earlier work Magdy addressed a disenchantment with reality when expectations are not met, but in No Shooting Stars he shows a respect for the unknown. Adopting a perspective of awe, Magdy recognises the limits of our knowledge and alludes to a type of knowledge that we do not have and might never have. In turn, he abandons the quest to capture the essence of the water territories, and the film becomes a meditation on the glimpses of its mystery. Down here there are no shooting stars, Down here there is another existence, That has no desire to make your wishes come true Basim Magdy in No Shooting Stars (2016) 7

8 Ngyuen Trinh thi etters from Panduranga, 2015 oproduction : Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques et CAPC musée d art contemporain de Bordeaux ourtesy de l artiste Basim Magdy No Shooting Stars, 2016 Super 16mm and GIF animations transferred to Full HD. Duration: 14 min 25 s. Co-comissioned by Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques and CAPC musée d art contemporain de Bordeaux Courtesy of the artist Basim Magdy,

9 BASIM MAGDY Born in 1977 in Assiut, Egypt Basim Magdy s work reveals a suspicion towards the way history is being shared to form a collective identity and hints at unsubstantiated truths that are part of a plot. While Magdy s works are often narrative in character they don t evolve as a story, since a story has a definitive beginning and an end and his works refuse linear framing. The works evoke a sense of loss and dystopia that purposely confuses time. This sensibility is reinforced by Magdy s technique: he shoots contemporary footage with a 16mm camera, a gesture that reads like a counter-claim to the past as a buried space. Basim Magdy s works recently have been shown, among other places, in the Third New Museum Triennial, New York (2015), the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2015), the Biennale de Montreal (2014) and Seoul Mediacity Biennial (2014). Magdy won the 2014 Abraaj Group Art Prize and was selected as Deutsche Bank s 2016 Artist of the Year. Selected exhibitions Group exhibitions «Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015», MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York, United-States - «La carte postale revisitée», La Companie, Marseille, France - «The New Museum Triennial : Surround Audience», New museum, New York, United States «On Site», NYU AD Art Gallery, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates - «Zipora Fried / Basim Magdy / Nabil Nahas / Dani Tull - On Stellar Rays», New York, United States Solo exhibitions «The Ones Who Refuse To Forget», artsümer, Istanbul, Turkey - «The Relentless Repitition of Reality», The Green Parrot, Barcelona, Spain - «The Many Colors of the Sky Radiate Forgetfulness», Cecilia Brunson Projects, London, United Kingdom «An Absent Population Laughs at its Haunting Withdrawal», Art in General, New York, United States - «Crystal Ball - IndieMovingImage 2014», ZDB - Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon, Portugal Basim Magdy. Courtesy of the artist. CATALOGUE Basim Magdy No shooting Stars Interview of the artist by Heidi Ballet and text by Kate Suton French / English, 15 x 21 cm 64 pages, 14 Coedition Jeu de Paume / CAPC musée d art contemporain de Bordeaux «Solar - High Line Art», The High Line, New York, United States - «Project 35 Volume 2», Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany - 13eme Biennale of Istanbul, Turkey «An Absent Population Laughs at its Haunting. Withdrawal», Art in General, New York, United States - «A Steady Progress of Nothingness», Newman. Popiashvili Gallery, New York, United States Available in a digital version for 6.99 from the online bookshop Art, Book, Magazine: 9

10 PRESS VISUALS The copyright-free reproduction and display of the following selection of images is permitted solely as part of the promotion of this exhibition at the Jeu de Paume and only while the exhibition is in progress. Press visuals to download on ID: presskit Password : photos Basim Magdy No Shooting Stars, 2016 Super 16mm and GIF animations transferred to Full HD. Duration: 14 min 25 s. Co-comissioned by Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques and CAPC musée d art contemporain de Bordeaux Courtesy of the artist Basim Magdy,

11

12

13

14

15 Press visuals to download on ID: presskit Password : photos

16 PRACTICAL INFO #BasimMagdy OPENING TIMES Tuesday (late-night opening): 11 am 9 pm Wednesday to Sunday: 11 am 7 pm Closed Monday, 25 th of December and 1 st of January ADMISSION Free entrance VISUALS FOR PRESS Copyright-free press visuals can be downloaded from login: presskit I password: photos CONTACTS Press: Annabelle Floriant T. +33(0) I +33(0) I annabellefloriant@jeudepaume.org Communication: Anne Racine T. +33(0) I anneracine@jeudepaume.org 1, PLACE DE LA CONCORDE, PARIS 8 e CONCORDE