Ali Kazma at İMALAT-HANE – Artforum International
“Time to Time” provides a mini-retrospective of Ali Kazma’s industrial videography that has been calibrated to the town of Bursa, with its working-class panorama of factories and farms. The 9 movies on show right here discover the overlaps between natural and machine processes, highlighting the aesthetics of functionalism.
Inside a spacious ground-floor corridor steeped in darkness, Kazma’s eight-minute three-channel video Tea Time, 2017, glows with the fluid inferno of a serious glassware workshop. By means of the percussive soundtrack, the artist channels the repetitious mechanization of fabric manufacturing, whereas the crisply edited sequences of burning cogs, levers, and gears orchestrate a shadow play of contemporary shopper engineering. Put in within the stairway, Clerk, 2011, offers an apt transition from the stark equipment of Tea Time to the portraits that await on the second ground. Within the video, the flash of a notary clerk’s stamp hammers onto a thick stack of paper for a three-and-a-half-minute train in human automation.
The seven movies that comply with take the viewer from the Svalbard International Seed Vault to the house of bibliophile Alberto Manguel, a closed jail, a distant lighthouse, a taxidermy workplace, and the ateliers of artists Sarkis and Füsun Onur. Kazma conveys his themes and topics not merely as objects shifting by area, however as a community of concepts and feelings, able to inhabiting even the coldest, most inhuman, and most individualized of areas.
— Matt Hanson
