REPLAY - Moving Image Series

Gypsum is pleased to introduce REPLAY, a new series dedicated to online presentations of moving images by artists. Focusing on film, video, and animation, the series recirculates works that are often encountered only within exhibition settings and makes them accessible for broader public viewing.

The first iteration of REPLAY features 2026, a film produced in 2010 by Maha Maamoun that imagines the year 2026.

The film will stream on our website from 26 March to 16 April, 2026.

2026

Maha Maamoun

Single-channel digital video, black-and-white, sound, 8 min. 21 sec., 2010.

In Maha Maamoun’s film, a time traveler recounts his vision of the Pyramids area—and, by extension, Egypt—in the year 2026. The man lies in a hammock, wearing an eye mask with cables running along his body, re-enacting an iconic scene from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). Yet rather than post-apocalyptic Paris, the scene unfolds in a deserted building in contemporary Cairo.

The film draws on an excerpt from Mahmoud Uthman’s Arabic-language science fiction novel The Revolution of 2053: The Beginning (2007), read in voiceover over a photographic sequence. The future described by the traveler remains caught in exhausted reformulations of the present.

2026 has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Access the film’s screening history here.

Maha Maamoun is an artist, curator and publisher living and working in Cairo. Her work examines the form, function and currency of popular visual and literary images as an entry point to investigating the cultural fabric that we weave and are woven into. She is a co-founder of the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC) – an independent non-profit space for art and culture founded in Cairo in 2004, and co-founder of Kayfa ta, a publishing and curatorial initiative founded in 2012. Her work was shown in numerous solo and group shows and biennials, and is in public collections including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sharjah Art Foundation, Barjeel Art Foundation, Bonnefantenmuseum, MuHKA, FRAC and Deutsche Bank. Learn more about her work here. 

Selected Screening History

2026 Other Skies: Global South Futurisms, GO SHORT International Film Festival, Nijmegen
2026 Black Movie, International Independent Film Festival, Geneva
2024  This was tomorrow, e-flux, New York
2024  Perhaps Here, Sharjah Art Foundation
2022  Maha Maamoun: Selected Works (2005-2013), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
2013  International Film Festival Rotterdam
2013  The "Planète Marker”, Centre Pompidou, Paris
2012  Project Space: Objects in Mirror are Closer than they Appear, Tate Modern, London

Selected Press

2026. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection.
Maha Maamoun: 2026 — HMKV Video of the Month. Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV).
Interview with Maha Maamoun. That Passes Between Us.
“Making Public: In Conversation with Maha Maamoun.” This Is Public Parking.