Ali Kazma (born 1971) is a Turkish video artist, best known for his series documenting human activity, and labor that explores the meaning of production and social organisation.
Living and working in Istanbul as a video artist since 1998 and becoming internationally established from 2007, Ali Kazma creates sets of short films that are usually between ten and twelve minutes long.
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.
In this work titled Today, Kazma had tracked down micro-level production and repair activities within the daily life of the neighbourhood where the exhibition took place.
Employing a small shift in time as its presentation strategy, this performative work articulated the artist’s own physical and mental labour as part of the daily routine of the neighbourhood and rendered visible in fragments all kinds of production, maintenance and repair activities that we often pass by without paying any attention –or do not see at all, because they are carried out indoors.
The majority of works in the Obstruction series have a focus on the effort human beings exert for the continuity, comfort, measurement, control, maintenance, repair etc.
Kazma attempts to read the complex meanings and the enigma produced by the body as a physical and conceptual space from within a broad network of relations.