Basim Magdy’s work is specific for a visual language that denotes its temperament: an iridescent, unhurried flow of images that act as a futurist’s outlook on the contemporary. The artist chemically alters his images with a lab technique he calls “pickling”, where films are cured using household solutions and exposed to light leaks, producing color and material effects that lay an absurdity over his subjects. The artist highlights a similar physicality to his soundscapes where he combines field recordings and found samples to create the multiple layers that track his films. Obsessed with the forthcoming and combining 16 mm film with GIF animations, his moving images and outtakes are technically and conceptually a play on time and the convergence of many technological and philosophical instants.

In his film No Shooting Stars, Basim Magdy takes the ocean as his protagonist, “an entity with many voices”. His interest in our anthropocentric relationship to the sea and its inhabitants is relayed in poetic confessions from disfigured mermaids to stone monsters and rocks protecting our artefacts of past existences. The ocean is character and stage, where all things hidden manifest in internet cables running deep under high security prisons. The suffering body is still in enough power to sustain a collective voice for the inanimate and the voiceless. The film is an exploration of the range of human projections onto this prodigious terrain from mythology and its extensions of fear to our technological calamities: an economic and historical understanding of the ocean throughout time.

Another featured film is The Everyday Ritual of Solitude Hatching Monkeys, a work that was inspired by Magdy El-Gohary’s short stories where an anonymous employee reads a line in a poem as a prophecy of his death. It warns him of the sea, the ominous presence that runs him into isolation and a complete unawareness of time. A phone conversation that occurs between him and a stranger relays a sense of disillusionment with reality. The dialogue questions what they believe is the meaning of a worthy life in the context of their estranged world.

Every Subtle Gesture is a series of photographs the artist has been developing over a number of years. The captions at a first glance seem to be amounting to a narrative but end up reading like a puzzle of non-linear aphorisms. The work creates a relationship between images and text that allows for a constant change of meaning every time the work is reconfigured, telling a different tale with each shuffle. Warnings of cyborg takeovers and existential anxiety is captioning images of the sea, airport concrete and other familiar landscapes in a constant state of anticipation.

In the new series Someone Tried to Lock Up Time, Basim Magdy combines recognized objects of history with a poetic mysticism that invokes both alienation and a feeling of familiar complicity. The text acts like a measure of time, be it a philosophical exploration of duration and how to capture it or a seemingly random correlation of past events. The images carry out the same action of free association: a Fayyum portrait that dates back to Roman Egypt, a cyborg bird and an ocean surfer are all parts of the same narrative. Interested in time and processes of selective historicization, Basim Magdy asks what will be made of us when we are looked at from the future and what artefacts remain to tell our stories?

The show features Magdy El-Gohary, an artist and botanic illustrator whose youth came at a time of a grand sweep of national projects, engineered to bring the future and its promised prosperity closer. His drawings illustrate in electromagnetic color a range of human and technological activity. Some of the sketches on show are specifically from a trip that El-Gohary had taken to the location of the High Dam, which was under construction at the time. Antennas, dozers and cranes populate a potentially fruitful barren landscape. Surrealist elements in El-Gohary’s work emphasize the alienation of these fields of progress and they become a stage, like the sea, to the formation of human relationships in moments of futile hope.

The exhibition brings together Basim Magdy’s work in reference to his father’s as a primary source of inspiration. It draws a course of associations from an ancient optimism to a despondent wariness of a laid out future that has always promised too much.