REPLAY - Moving Image Series
Gypsum is pleased to present the third edition of REPLAY, a series dedicated to online presentations of moving-images by artists. Focusing on film, the series recirculates works that are often encountered only within exhibition settings, making them accessible for broader public viewing.
For its third edition, this iteration features Basim Magdy’s most recent film, The Birds Choose the Cards.
The film will stream on our website from 27 September to 5 October.
THE BIRDS CHOOSE THE CARDS
BASIM MAGDY
Super 16mm film transferred to Full HD. 24 min, 2024
“I had an idea for a new film, then a pandemic landed over our heads like a renegade meteorite. Two years later I started working on what was meant to be a film about sunsets and tourism and war. It ended up being about all that, but as the world kept sliding down the unimaginable, I started thinking of Socrates' allegory of the cave. In the meantime, I spent a night in Taipei looking for a fortune teller whose two tiny birds knew what couldn't be told otherwise. Everywhere I went offered a piece from a puzzle that the film wasn't intended to solve, Saint-Nazaire, New York, Malta, South East Australia. I remembered the night the invasion of Iraq started. I remembered standing in front of a window in the Sarajevo airport a few years ago, wondering why I had tears in my eyes. It was the moment I recognized the view from watching the news about the Siege of Sarajevo in my childhood.
Eventually I went to film hordes of tourists with their phones pointed at a cannon in Malta. Once it was fired, the cheering and applauding felt endless. Two hours later I filmed the sunset in the same location. Nothing made sense but I knew either me or the birds I met around Melbourne had to say something about this ongoing horror. We both said it at the same time.” — Basim Magdy
Basim Magdy (1977, Assiut, Egypt. Lives and works in Basel and Cairo). Magdy is an artist and filmmaker who enjoys working with expanded forms of different mediums including painting, photography, film, text, poetry, sculpture and installation.
In 2026 he was awarded the Helmut-Kraft Foundation Prize. In 2016 he was selected Deutsche Bank’s 2016 Artist of the Year. He was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize, Kiev (2012) and won the Abraaj Art Prize, Dubai and the New:Vision Award, CPH:DOX Film Festival, Copenhagen (2014) and the Experimental Award at the Curtas Vila do Conde – International Film Festival, Portugal (2015). His films were screened at Tate Modern, Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, ICA London among many others.
Read his full biography here.
Screening History
2026 Le Grand Cafe, Saint-Nazaire, France (screening)
2026 La Kunsthalle Mulhous, Mulhouse, France (screening)
2026 Basim Magdy: 2019–2026 AD: A Series of Disjointed Ideas Forming a Coherent Train of Thought, artSümer, Istanbul
2026 SKYground, Mardin Biennial, Turkey (curated by Çelenk Bafra)
2025 International Short Film Competition, BIEFF - Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (screening)
2025 Basim Magdy: The Birds Choose the Cards. Kunsthalle Bern (curated by iLiana Fokianaki)
2025 Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Berwick-upon-Tweed, UK. New Cinema Award Winner (World Festival Premiere)