Ali Kazma

Born 1971 in Turkey he ives and works in Istanbul.  

The dream of a “human encyclopaedia”

Turkish video artist Ali Kazma has taken part in numerous exhibitions in France, Switzerland, Latin America, Italy and the United States. His work was shown at the 2001 and 2010 Istanbul Biennales, at the Istanbul Modern, at the Havana Biennial in Cuba and at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006, and at the Palais de Tokyo for a “special film screening” organised on the occasion of his being awarded the Nam June Paik Prize in 2010.

Since the early 2000s Ali Kazma has been developing a singular way of representing human activity. Whether they are conveying the professional skill of a butcher in Istanbul, of a watchmaker, of a taxidermist, of textile workers, of dancers, or of a painter, the procedure and approach are the same: attention, documentation, and formal subtlety. Kazma inventories the world of work and human production, both material and aesthetic. His style puts the emphasis on optical precision, narrative ellipsis and unexpected visual effects, while never lapsing into anything facile or overly seductive. This visual apprehension is objective and direct. Kazma’s video images are at once archaeological and poetical. The work is archaeological by virtue of the artist’s striving for exactitude and the extreme precision with which he films the actions of people at work. It is poetic by virtue of the aesthetic of the images and by its conscious construction of a world where man accomplishes himself in his activity, which then becomes, in the sense understood by Hannah Arendt, an “action.” The result of Kazma’s very particular approach is a powerful impression of truth; a resonant sensation of beauty.

By his manifest determination never to exaggerate, never to give in to hubris (excess), Ali Kazma also sets out to make a forceful case against the spectacular economy which has come to control the field of the common images spewed out by television and computer screens. His art can be seen as a poetics of appreciation working close to our condition. To develop images of human work in the way Kazma proceeds is thus to metaphorise the essential part of our life, activity, by inscribing it within a dynamics of elevation. If reality is very much present in these images, the sublime is never far away. The spectator in front of the screen shifts constantly between acknowledgment and fascination. Yes, this is how men live.

But what happens when they no longer live in a given place? What historical traces do men leave when they die? These are the questions answered by the two videos presented in “History is mine!” The title of these works by Kazma hint at the notion of traces.
Past: at Bibracte, in the heart of Burgundy’s Morvan area, Kazma filmed the world of the Gauls, or rather, the work of archaeologists (with which, in its way, the artist’s filming becomes associated) attempting to cast light on the tenuous traces of a world that is as glorious as it is lost. History was written at Bibracte.