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22/3/2010

Ali Kazma

Tanas - Space for Contemporary Turkish Art, Berlin

In Ali Kazma's first solo exhibition in Germany, TANAS presents eight works from the artist's video series Obstructions. The videos are closely observed portraits of people pursuing their occupations day after day, producing things, making repairs, making things function. Kazma goes to different locations such as a clockmaker's workshop, a brain surgeon's operating room, a steel mill near Istanbul, a slaughterhouse, a jeans factory, and a ballet studio. Complex actions and fields of activity from the workaday world - cutting, punching, piercing, drilling, heating, sewing, drawing, cleaning, testing, labeling, classifying - are documented through precise long-term observation and keenly honed images.

The work "Brain Surgeon" shows a doctor prepping and operating on a woman suffering from Parkinson's disease. "Slaughterhouse" begins with a butcher's knife being sharpened and documents the traditional method stipulated by religious dietary law: the animal is killed by a single clean cut. In "Clock Master", the artist observes a clockmaker's dexterity as he restores a 19th century French clock, while "Jean Factory" follows the complicated process used to mass-produce a garment.

The element linking all the videos is the human drive to counteract threats to the fragile equilibrium between order and chaos through unremitting hard work. When the brain surgeon attempts to heal the body or the clockmaker repairs an antique clock, analogous skills are involved. Likewise, the work of the butcher in the slaughterhouse and the seamstress in the jeans factory have a common purpose, the satisfaction of basic human needs. The juxtaposition of videos of different lengths creates an additional level of content, for the coincidental interplay of images and sounds from the individual videos continually offers new perspectives and insights.

Ali Kazma's video work "What Remains", recently shown in the TANAS group exhibition "Not easy to save the world in 90 days", accompanied the Galatasaray soccer team from melancholy hotel rooms to glamorous trophy matches, portraying the whole gamut of their everyday life. In the series Obstructions, Kazma's fascination turns to how people constantly endeavor to shape and maintain the environment through their own efforts.

Ali Kazma on his work:
"I am very interested in the passing of things. In Clock Master I enjoy the multiple ways the issue of temporality is approached - time as change, as decay vs. the constant struggle of man to possess and control it; by intellectualizing, systemizing, form-giving, caring, etc. Ultimately, of course it is a lost cause. In the case of the clock master, a man working to fix a representation of time; a clock, on and through which time has passed. Human Will as Local and Temporal Obstructions against Temporality and/or Temporality as the Ultimate Obstruction against Human Will/ Desire. Obstructions for me is a code word for the complicated co-existence of both."

Ali Kazma lives and works in Istanbul.
Exhibitions (selection):
2009 Ali Kazma. Obstructions, Yapı Kredi Kazım Taşkent Art Gallery, Istanbul
Ali Kazma. Retroprospective, Analix Forever, Genua
2008 The City Rises, Istanbul Modern, Istanbul
Last Things, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster
2007 The History of a Decade That Has Not Yet Been Named, 9e Biennale de Lyon, Lyon
2004 Love It or Leave It, Cetinje Biennial V, Cetinje

Image: Slaughterhouse, 2007 (Video Still)

Opening: Tuesday March 23, 2010, 6 - 9 pm

TANAS
Heidestraße 50 - 10557 Berlin
Tuesday–Saturday 11.00 AM - 6.00 PM

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