The Magic of the State is an exhibition and editorial project, taking place in Cairo and in London in Spring 2013. Each exhibition features a different constellation of works by the same artists, including new commissions, and a public program of performances, talks and screenings.

The project borrows its title from the eponymous book by anthropologist Michael Taussig. In this text, combining fiction with analysis, Taussig conceives the modern State as configured through a theatre of spirit possession into the living body of society. Historically placed at the intersection of science, religion and politics, the concept of magic exists in an integral relationship to that of power. Magic in its broadest sense is addressed within the context of the project: both secular magic and its connection to propaganda and mysticism with its claim to access supernatural entities and powers.

Magic's coerciveness lies in its power to transform, simultaneously holding together the desire to believe and the desire to doubt. Here, politics and magic, statecraft and stagecraft, converge as performance. The exhibition at Beirut opens with "Interpretation", a performance by Lili Reynaud-Dewar. The work features iconic Glaswegian club performer Mary Knox and Parisian experimental musician Hendrik Hegray in a recitation of the visionary political broadsheets of Sun Ra, woven together with the emancipatory force of free jazz of records from the collection of "La Grande Oreille", a record shop active in La Rochelle between 1975 and 1979. During the first week of the program, Rana Hamadeh will enact "Al Karantina", a newly commissioned lecture-performance that explores the relationship between resistance and contagion by considering the plague in ancient Athens as an allegory for the current Arab uprisings. Ryan Gander presents "In Use – (Alchemy Box # 39)" and "Ogenblik - (Alchemy Box # 101)", two sculptures made of common objects in which mysterious contents are sealed, that alchemically connect the exhibition spaces in Cairo and London; and "I had a Message from the Curator" a performance originally scripted for dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany.

The invited artists adopt magic as a filter to chart, re-evaluate and disrupt the immanent and circular exchange of power forces through given social, economic and political structures. In Goldin+Senneby's installation "The Decapitation of Money", economic geographer Angus Cameron draws a series of associations between George Bataille's obsession with decapitation as a release of energy and his understanding of sovereignty, regicide and economics; the emergence of the Eurodollar in the 1950s and offshore finance beyond the jurisdiction of the sovereign state. For Liz Magic Laser's "The Digital Face", dancers Alan Good and Cori Kresge replicate the gestural movements from two State of the Union addresses: President Barack Obama's 2012 speech and George H. W. Bush's 1990 speech, claimed to be the first televised presidential address to feature gesticulating hands. Referencing Francois Delsartre's 19th Century studies in gestural expression, the work exposes a studied body language that maximizes the American President's emphatic display.

Anja Kirschner and David Panos' video installation "Ultimate Substance" examines the current Greek economic crisis by revisiting ancient myths and looking at how the introduction of coinage affected the emergence of abstract mathematical and philosophical knowledge. Christodoulos Panayiotou presents a series of photographs selected from the Press and Information Office in Nicosia. The works excavate the rituals and ceremonies that underline the construction of a national narrative and the constitution of Cyprus as a modern nation state following independence from Great Britain.

At a time of uncharted and complex political transition in Egypt, the selected and newly commissioned works question the legacy of outmoded systems of beliefs and mythological principles within the modern state, pointing to the slippage between the prescriptive intent and the idiosyncratic manifestations of stately power. They chart the potential of alternative aggregations, and explore the possibility of resistance by thinking laterally and looking at unorthodox places.

A compendium on art, magic and politics, featuring essays, spells, fiction and true stories in both English and Arabic, will follow the exhibition, with contributions by Will Bradley, Hany Darwish, Michael Taussig, a phone-conversation between Peter Lamborn Wilson and Evan Calder Williams, and others.

Conceived as a collaboration between Beirut in Cairo and Lisson Gallery in London, this project charts the encounter between two contrasting art institutions operating in very different contexts: a young independent not-for-profit space in the making and an established private gallery. This practice-based exchange opens up a shared space for reflections on the different economic, logistical, social and political realities these institutions inhabit.

Curated by Silvia Sgualdini of Lisson Gallery and Beirut.