Bassem Saad
Bassem Saad is an artist/writer born on September 11th and trained in architecture. His practice deals with future visualization and simulation, and economies that distribute violence, pleasure, care, and waste. He attempts to locate space and time for toying with, and maneuvering within governance systems, through video, text, spatial installations, and virtual environments.
The project comprises video and virtual environment, installation, and text. The interactive web environment, Syscare, is accessible freely online. The video, Kink Retrograde, is a short fiction film essay that tells the story of protagonists living in toxic space-times who devise new social contracts based only on consensual violence and risk.
Kink Retrograde
Kink Retrograde (film, 19 minutes)
Kink Retrograde presents a speculative allegory whose protagonists live in a world and city presided over by shocks that come to resemble the apparent retrograde motion of celestial bodies: cyclical and seemingly backwards moving. The intoxicated characters decide that the social contract between themselves and the sovereign powers has always been breached, and so they must devise a new and transparent contract aware of its own abjectness, risk, and deviance — one of total kink.
Kink Retrograde
Kink Retrograde
"In this project and elsewhere in my work, time-based media is accompanied by a spatial set-up of sculptural objects, heightening the experience of all the constituent parts while also allowing for different combinations of those individual parts. Within this project, I began to construct sculptural pieces with wearable ergonomic devices that are ostensibly designed to maximize the productivity of a human body or nurse it back to full health".
Music: Zeynab Ghandour aka Thoom,
Performer: Rayyan Abdelkhalek, with appearances by bJessika Khazrik, Veda Thozhur Kolleri, Nada Zanhour
Equipment provided by Panos Aprahamian and Ashkal Alwan
Interior shots at Mkalles Warehouse, courtesy of Renata Sabella
Kink Retrograde
All Cared for by Chains and Loops created for the web residencies by Solitude and ZKM on the topic »Planetary Glitch
