Ali Kazma is in pursuit of a discovery of the human condition. The Turkish video artist, who received the Nam June Paik Media Art Award this year, is aiming to better understand the production of the world while exploring the human condition.
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| Aaxidermist working- from Ali Kazma’s video |
Knowing the backstage of those production processes is an important thing for Kazma.
That’s why he prefers to use the backstage of the production processes of some professions in his videos and is trying to reflect on the transformation of the world.
“I sense that this will be a long-term project,” he said.
The video series, titled “Obstructions” started in 2005. Kazma has dealt with dancers, a fashion house, a jean factory, a slaughterhouse, a brain surgeon, a design factory, a clock master, a taxidermist, a steel factory, the kitchen of a famous French restaurant and a painter in his work since then. However, he is willing to expand his video art projects.
While making his dancer video, he focused on a dancer’s dance piece and how this piece comes to real life, in his slaughterhouse project, Kazma focused on the process of turning live animals into packaged meat that everyone consumes.
“The important thing is to learn and understand deeply the production people are involved in,” said Kazma.
The artist tries to reflect the purest versions of those production processes in his videos and is attempting to draw the map of the condition of being human in contemporary life.
“I will continue to do works on the processes which are transforming the world,” he said but added that he was not interested in learning how a brain surgeon works or how a jean factory works.
Each production that he chooses reveals a different human capacity to transform, which does not exist exactly in the same way in other professions.
“I know that I can be a part of a production process with my own profession. This is a way of accessing and reaching normally invisible things for me,” he said, adding that knowing the backstage of a production process helped him to understand himself better and make better decisions concerning his life, while combining this process with his art.
“My aim is to discover how humankind lives,” he said.
Noting that the dialogue and the relation between his video works are very important, Kazma said: “The spaces that my works are exhibited in are important for me. The space can reveal the real relation between my video projects. While in a more lineal architectural space, the interaction between my works [is] always limited, in a more inextricable space the interaction between the videos become varied and more dynamic.”
The space can change the audio visual interaction between the videos, according to Kazma.
Nam June Paik award
When Nam June Paik, a Korean-born American artist, worked with a variety of media, he did not know that he would become such an inspiration for artists today.
The Nam June Paik Award, which was granted for the fifth time this year, both aims to bring together, in a single exhibition, young artists whose works exhibit a connection to Nam’s oeuvre and to determine a winner for the award from the ranks of these artists. The award is organized by Kunststiftung NRW, or Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Nam is globally considered to be one of the founders of video and media art.
This is not the first award that Kazma has received as the artist was awarded the emerging artists award of
UNESCO in 2001, during the seventh Istanbul Biennial.
“Antoni Muntadas, a world-renown, documentary artist, proposed me as a candidate for nomination. There are four people in the first selection committee. Everyone offers three or four artists as candidates for nomination. However, then this number decreases to eight or six people and that’s when the short list appears,” he said.
This year Kazma received the award along with Italian artist Rosa Barba.
Kazma’s works are usually showing in continental Europe – mostly in France, Italy and Germany.
In Istanbul, Kazma has shown his works at Platform Garanti, Yapı Kredi Kazım Taşkent Art Center, Istanbul Modern, Borusan Art Gallery and in 2001 and 2007, the Istanbul Biennial.
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| a clock master from Kazma’s video art |
Kazma is preparing a new work called “O.K.” for the new group exhibition at Arter.
Speaking on how he works on his video pieces, Kazma said: “I aim to show only the pure process. For example in the slaughterhouse video I realized that I had many violent and hard-to-watch scenes, which involves the dying of an animal. I was careful not to make the piece just about that. I do not want to be sensational or pornographic.”