Basim Magdy »Cassowarius Rex«

Cassowarius Rex, 2015

Basim Magdy's edition, created on the occasion of the exhibition The Relentless Repetition of Reality at The Green Parrot, a project space in Barcelona, in 2015, displays a picture taken years ago at a natural history museum of a taxidermy Cassowary. Magdy's recurrent investigation of memory processes lead to his interest in taxidermy as a way of fixing recollections and therefore preventing them from fading. The Cassowary is the third tallest non-flying bird and one of the most colorful, it lives in New Guinea and parts of Australia and it is considered to be a vicious and aggressive bird.

Basim Magdy

Basim Magdy (born 1977 in Assiut, Egypt) has created a multifaceted oeuvre in recent years encompassing film, photography, slide projections, installations, and works on paper. At the center of all of his works are structures of seeing, remembering, and archiving.

By underlining our daily conscious or unconscious forms engagement with historical discourses, his work points out our participation in the construction of collective readings of the past and projections for the future, therefore signaling our ability to participate in the shaping of the present. At the same time, he appeals to the viewer’s imagination and reveals alternative realities and social blueprints.

Magdy‘s work appeared internationally in numerous solo exhibitions and group shows including The Stars Were Aligned for a Century of New Beginnings, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the MAXXI National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome, and the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, Berlin (2016); No Shooting Stars, Jeu de Paume, Paris (2015); The New Museum Triennial: Surround Audience, New Museum, New York (2015); and The Relentless Repetition of Reality, The Green Parrot, Barcelona (2015). He is also the recipient of the Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year 2016” award. The artist lives and works in Basel and Cairo.