The Egyptian director Bassem Magdy, one of today's most important rising artists, will compete at the Rotterdam film festival with his latest short film, "The Many Colors of the Sky Radiate Forgetfulness" with strong expectations to win a prize. Bassem Magdy is an Egyptian artist whose work combines painting, installation, photography, sculpture, text and film to explore the ever-changing space between reality and fiction. Magdy was born in Assiut in 1977, and received his BFA in painting from Helwan University in 2000. Last March, he won the Abraaj Group Art Prize for his previous film "The Dent". He currently lives and works between Basel, Switzerland, and Cairo. In Magdy's films, anonymous narrators tell stories stripped of place and time. Recounting what sounds like memories from the future, the discordance that emerges between text, image and sound evoke confusion in quietly humorous ways. Through a process known as 'pickling' the analogue film, Magdy creates lush color effects that melt the frames together to take us into otherworldly places. 'The Many Colors of the Sky Radiate Forgetfulness' film explores a tactile decay, as it relates to memory or active forgetting, and its consequences. Phrases such as, 'Only stone, bronze and sky shall outlive all the rest' suggest the consequences of a coming apocalypse as images seamlessly alternate between a decaying monument, natural ecological scenes and uncanny taxidermied animals. Though we are unaware of precise time and place (the monument is from WWII but the artist chooses to leave details ambiguous) the film reflects on the timeless, yet repeated fatal errors of forgetfulness by the human race and its continuously blind misinterpretation of the natural environment. For over a decade, Magdy said that he has been working with film, works on paper and photography and most recently with a unique system of 'film pickling' where the film is exposed to household chemicals that alter the color and image. Ultimately Magdy's use of acidic or kaleidoscopic color in his work exposes the more traumatic element of the speculated narrative. ''My avid, combined interests in science, science fiction, natural phenomena as well as futurology, underline many of my work'' said Magdy. Magdy will be competing in the Rotterdam festival for the top prize alongside entries from the USA, France, Canada, Singapore, Norway, Germany, Vietnam and the Netherlands. The competition boasts 10 world premieres and will run from Jan. 21- Feb. 1
