Book launch, talk & screening: 13 Essential Rules for Understanding the World by Basim Magdy

On Tuesday, 5 May, at 8 p.m., Hyper Hypo is pleased to invite you to the book launch of 13 Essential Rules for Understanding the World by Basim Magdy. During the event, Magdy and Vaslamatzi will be in conversation, accompanied by a screening of two of Magdy’s films at Hyper Hypo.

Combining original super 8 filmstrips and original photographs with his signature satirical text, award-winning artist Basim Magdy reimagines his acclaimed 2011 film into a richly illustrated artist book. While the world has changed so much since then, these guidelines offer the perfect dose of disillusionment to face it all.

Designed meticulously by Engy Aly, whose approach highlighted the materiality of Super 8 film, the book design emphasizes its original existence as a film. For Magdy, every idea has many tentacles, they dance in sync with one another while inhabiting their own space and performing the dance differently.

In the style of instructional books, 13 Essential Rules for Understanding the World is a melodramatic yet contemplative attempt to climb a mountain that is impossible to conquer. A key element is the constant lingering tension between sarcasm and absurdity. The rules, along with tulips whose petals bear roughly drawn faces, highlight this confusion. The book questions how constructed knowledge presents the world to us. It highlights the contradictions using flashes of humor to comment on broad concepts like progress, collective action, or independent thought. In the end, what seems like a didactic list of instructions becomes an invitation—philosophically inspired—to rethink what we think and to question commonly accepted structures of knowledge.

Conceived in 2011, Magdy’s original film had a prolific life across biennials, museums, artist-run spaces, film festivals, museum collections and on Tumblr where, —at the height of the platform’s popularity—stills from the super 8 film went viral among an incredibly curious generation that came of age on the internet. Taken out of context and perceived as meme-like anecdotes for an ever-changing world, these stills sparked curiosity. Magdy’s insistence on making his films accessible online gave the film another rich life, playing from his website on laptops and phone screens in random locations. Eventually a dream was born – a book. Although the book was completed, it remained unpublished until late 2025, when, during a conversation with curator and artist Eva Vaslamatzi, Magdy decided to publish it.

All copies available at the book launch will be signed.

Basim Magdy was born in Assiut, Egypt. He is an artist and filmmaker who is particularly interested in working with expanded forms across painting, photography, film, poetry and installation. His work explores unusual ways of constructing narratives to respond to the absurdity of everyday life. His work was exhibited at M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; MCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MAXXI National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome; Taipei Fine Art Museum; MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; New Museum, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris among others. His films were screened at Tate Modern, Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam among many others