To Hypnotize Them With Forgetfulness by Basim Magdy

With an essay by Bruce Jenkins and a conversation between Basim Magdy and exhibition curator Kendra Paitz. To Hypnotize Them with Forgetfulness is published in conjunction with a survey of Basim Magdy's films—presented at University Galleries in 2018. Featuring films, photographs, and text-based murals created from 2011–2019, the publication focuses on the artist’s process-based experiments with altering analog film and writing absurd storylines. Educated as a painter in Cairo, Magdy began to shift his focus more toward working with photographs and manipulating film in 2011. He explains that he could use film as “a tool to communicate ideas related to…

With an essay by Bruce Jenkins and a conversation between Basim Magdy and exhibition curator Kendra Paitz.

To Hypnotize Them with Forgetfulness is published in conjunction with a survey of Basim Magdy's films—presented at University Galleries in 2018. Featuring films, photographs, and text-based murals created from 2011–2019, the publication focuses on the artist’s process-based experiments with altering analog film and writing absurd storylines.

Educated as a painter in Cairo, Magdy began to shift his focus more toward working with photographs and manipulating film in 2011. He explains that he could use film as “a tool to communicate ideas related to loss, destruction, confusion, and the apocalypse.” His endless transformations include “pickling” the film in household solutions; placing a kaleidoscope in front of the lens; and utilizing masks, light leaks, and double exposures. The resulting painterly distortions of image and color are vibrant, unexpected, and hypnotic. Magdy then composes improbable narratives—often about future aspirations, failure, and the repetition of history—which are added as both voiceovers and captions. Strangely haunting and darkly humorous, the works create, in the artist’s words, “a visually different version of reality” and a “narrative that has no beginning and no end.”