On opening Basim Magdy’s current website, one sees an image of an airliner above a dreadful ocean’s surface. The caption reads: ‘Everyone partied and no one cared’. Will this plane ever arrive at its final destination? Is it meant as a metaphor for the current status quo of our conflict-ridden planet?

It is this kind of dystopian that characterizes the elegant artistic vocabulary of the Egyptian artist now primarily based in Basel. Basim Magdy was born in Assiut, Egypt, in 1977. He received a BFA in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Helwan University, Cairo. Investigating the inconsistencies of our past and present, and imagining the possible complexities and inevitable uncertainties of our near future, Magdy uses a wide variety of media: paper, paint, film and video, installation, slide shows and photographs.

Magdy was appointed ‘Artist of the Year 2016’ by Deutsche Bank’s Global Art Advisory Council, comprising the four international curators Okwui Enwezor, Hou Hanru, Udo Kittelmann and Victoria Noorthoorn. Instead of receiving prize money, the artist was invited to present a solo show at the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle in Berlin (from April to July 2016). This was Magdy’s first one-man exhibition. Using the highly poetic title The Stars Were Aligned for a Century of New Beginnings, Magdy developed a non-hierarchical narrative that led the viewer through a multifaceted cosmos of visual experiences: from psychedelically-charged works on paper to slide shows and films.

Using a highly seductive visual vocabulary reminiscent of the late 1960s or early 1970s (when faith in a better future was still a notion shared by a sweeping majority of people) Magdy often leads his audience along a dead-end kind of road. His protagonists are equipped with protective suits; they wear breathing masks and hold unidentifiable technical appliances in their hands. But the colourful environments they inhabit seem overly hostile. A typical work on paper – Our Spies Saw an Early Pollination Season on the Horizon (2013) – shows four masked protagonists in some sort of hovering landscape composed of colourful geometric forms, and holding empty speech balloons against a decomposed-grey sky. His 16mm film The Dent (2014), in which Magdy blends such seemingly incoherent found footage – from military parades and cemeteries to elephants in a zoo and protozoa under a microscope – with sound, music and narrative subtitles. It is an inventory of delusionary hope and collective failure.

Mankind has assembled too much knowledge about what can go ‘wrong’, and history has too often shown that in the end the ‘bad guys’ triumph over the benevolent and starry-eyed idealists. It is this kind of bitter reality that Magdy – a master of alienation-effects and unconventional experimental techniques – shows us in his multilayered, yet cohesive, body of work.

His audience should, nevertheless, not be excessively discouraged by his politically underscored, surreal and dystopian visions. In a recent interview Magdy stated: ‘Maybe I’m more interested in issues that are not particularly pleasant, but I have to say that my favourite reaction to the work I make is when people look at it and smile or laugh’.