PRESENTATION: Ali Kazma

Ali Kazma creates sets of short films that are usually between ten and twelve minutes long. In his multi-video formats, Kazma creates archives of the human condition through his fascination with man and the nature of life and death. In presenting the audience with conflicting notions of human nature, as well as our spatial relationship with our body and our physical surroundings, we are shown the complexities within these topics.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: NMNM Archive

Ali Kazma, practice centres on the media of photography and video. His works raise fundamental questions about the meaning of human activities. Whether in the fields of economics, industry, science, medicine, society or art, each of his videos questions the developments that take place in our societies, and together gradually represent a vast archive of the human condition. Kazma shoots and edits all his videos himself. Ali Kazma’s solo exhibition at Nouveau Musée National de Monaco comprises three videos: “Top Fuel” (2020). This fifteen-minute video focuses on Anita Mäkelä, a Finnish drag-racer. It required Kazma to travel to California, Germany and Sweden where the races took place. Paradoxically, it is through the use of long sequence-shots that Ali Kazma succeeds in immersing the viewer in the intense space-time of drag racing. He shows the meticulous and patient preparation needed by Anita Mäkelä and her team to convey the lightning-fast nature of her races. This is where Top Fuel transcends its subject: rather than a documentary about drag racing, it becomes a meditation on time and the quest for the absolute. The video is rounded out by a set of photographs taken during the video’s preparation. “A House of Ink” (2022) and” Sentimental” (2022). How is it possible to communicate the nature of the least cinematic activity of all – writing? This is the question Ali Kazma was faced with when he accepted the proposal made by his compatriot Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, to film him at home in his large, empty and light-filled flat in the Cihangir district of Istanbul. In the first video, “A House of Ink” (2022), Ali Kazma employs three screens to show a succession of details of the Turkish writer’s flat, his manuscripts, his library, brief moments of life, etc., as if this interior revealed, however allusively, Pamuk’s inner world. As if it were not simply the place of creation, but also the means. “Sentimental” (2022), this time projected, is the fruit of a brief exchange between the writer and the video artist after days of silent shots and confirms this intuition. It shows Pamuk signing piles of books while also questioning two sorts of artists: the “naïve” type who travels the world in search of inspiration, and the “sentimental” artist who, like Pamuk, requires the peace and permanence of what might be called “a room of his own” to create.

Born in 1971, Istanbul, Ali Kazma completed his undergraduate studies in the United States in 1993. After briefly studying photography in London, he returned to the US to study film in 1995. He received his MA from The New School University in New York City where he worked as a teaching assistant. Ali Kazma was granted the 2001 UNESCO Award for the Promotion of the Arts and received the 2010 Nam June Paik Award for his “Obstructions” series, which he has been working on since 2005. Kazma’s video works question and explore the different rhythms and states of human existence and its relationship to contemporary conditions. He has exhibited his works at the Istanbul Biennial (2001, 2007, 2011), Tokyo Opera City (2001), Platform Garanti Istanbul (2004), Istanbul Modern (2004), 9th Havana Biennial (2006), San Fransisco Art Institute (2006), Lyon Biennial (2007), Francesca Minini, Milan (2008, 2012, 2015), 55° Venice Biennale, Pavilion of Turkey (2013), Jeu de Paume Paris (2017).

Photo: Ali Kazma, A House of Ink (Video still), 2022, © Ali Kazma, courtesy the artist and Musée National de Monaco

Info: Curator: Guillaume de Sardes, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Villa Sauber, 17 avenue Princesse Grace, Monaco, Monaco, Duration: 16/12/2022-1/1/2023, Days & Hours: Dailly 10:00-18:00, https://www.nmnm.mc/