Ali Kazma’s video project Obstructions presented at the Q-box gallery, Athens, raises a rich set of questions about the production and consumption of consumer goods and the labour process as developed in the industrial capitalist societies in a global network. Kazma’s videos are real-time narratives that constitute a coherent representation of the conditions of labour through different interpretations and layers of meaning. The artist attempts to give shape to his own vision of contemporary society. At the same time he calls into question the very practice of general characterisation and the way we form our notions of society as a whole.

When entering the gallery one witnesses juxtaposed screens, each one of them documenting and detecting various modes of production. They all document human activities related to maintenance, repair, production and creation. Kazma is exploring the parameters of service, promotion, communication and utility value. As the artist states: ‘I am interested in exploring the special relationship that exists between the producer — artist, artisan, factory — and the product and how that process fits into the “bigger” picture of our contemporary society, what it tells us about our values and our relationship with the world as we consume ourselves and all that is around us in our work.‘ [i]

The documentation range is wide and goes back from 2005 to the present. Jean Factory, 2008, which documents the manufacturing of blue jeans, inside the Turkish Mavi-Erak factory in Istanbul stands next to the Household Goods Factory, recording modes of production in Alessi, a well-known Italian design company, as they produce design objects outside Milan. Massive production and design is set next to craftsmanship, detected in the video Studio Ceramist which documents Alev Ebuzziya Siesbye, a well-known Turkish ceramist and designer, as she makes one of her clay works in her studio in Paris.

In terms of presentation the exhibition takes the form of a project platform. The artist travels from one country to the next in order to object, detect and record modes of ranging from the artisan creation of ceramics to the mechanical, manufactured production of a factory of jean trousers. Kazma, relates — in the context of the expansion of art into pragmatic discourses — two important notions for artistic work, the combination of symbols of difference and their presence in socio-political reality. As Stefan Berg observes: ‘each video stands out as a project platform and is therefore only good as its ability to give productive form to the implicit relationship between its own meaning and the world. As such, the relativity of our options for experiencing art is a necessary basis for our understanding of production and labour.’ [ii]

The ‘dramatics’ of production and consumption points, by way of metaphorical allusion, are also stated in the video Brain Surgeon, a documentation of a brain surgery in Turkey. Bio-politics issues are set aside notions of cultural inheritance: in the video Clock Master the repair of a 19th century French clock by the official clock master of the Ottoman Museum in Istanbul. Kazma touches on issues of control, of production in Western societies as opposed to Eastern cultures, such as Turkey, commenting on the global command function and the complexity of exchanges between the West and more peripheral territories such as towns in Turkey, between market products of a high rate, such as the clock industry and the design industry and popular culture products such as the jeans industry in Turkey. Through a market of inequities the local demand accompanies the culture of the producers. The clock or the design industry is far slower than the rapid production in the jeans factory. One makes comparisons between the sectors of production and notices the differences in labour between mass production and goods of a ‘high’ status.

As Boris Groys argues in the catalogue of Documenta 11 (Kassel, 2001): ‘The technical documentation is incidentally, never constructed as history but always as a system of instructions for producing particular objects under given circumstances. The artistic documentation whether real of fictive is, by contrast, primarily narrative and thus it evokes the unrepeatability of living time.’ [iii] The play of narratives in Kazma’s videos goes further and further. His video Slaughterhouse documents a day in the life of an industrial slaughterhouse in Istanbul and the production stands loaded with a far more dramatic overtone.

It appears that Kazma is viewing the market and its labour conditions and the information flow in a critical and personalised way, although he claims to be working as a steer, detached observer, as a ‘ghost’ in relation to what is set in front of his camera. This observation process adopted seems objective and detached, yet it denotes a phenomenological stance and a personalised position in terms of analysing experience and information. Rediscovering phenomena through subjective actions is a principle claim made by Merleau-Ponty in his major work The Phenomenology of Perception, 1945: ‘The first philosophical act would appear to be to return to the world of actual experience which is prior to the objective world, since it is in it that we shall be able to grasp the theoretical basis no less than the limits of that objective world, restore to things their concrete physiognomy, to organisms their individual ways of dealing with the world, and to subjectivity its inherence in history. Our task will be, moreover, to rediscover phenomena, the layer of living experience through which other people and things are first given to us, the system “Self-others-Things” as it comes into being; to re-awaken perception and foil its trick of allowing us to forget is a fact and as perception in the interest of the object which it presents to us and of the rational tradition to which it gives rise.’ [iv]

Service, promotion, communication and utility value are concepts which prevail in each of the videos presented. Labour as a concept is being examined and in a symbolic way the products themselves are being aestheticised. The artist gives through the comparison of the videos the reflection of the representational politics of commodity. In locating the position of contemporary men — what it means to exist and how he exists — in the contemporary world, it is very important for me to look at different iconic contemporary situations.

Kazma makes clear that ‘in these symbol-locations, many aspects of the human condition are revealed. All videos deal with the way we as humans relate, give form, change and create the world around us, time and time again. With these videos, I always do my own shooting — not rejecting the possibility that this might or cannot be the case forever — and my own editing. I do not have a crew, lights or assistants when I am on location.’ Through his personalised way of ‘seeing things’ the artist scrutinises the divergent ways in which capital societies operate and searches for a subjective code in analysing ‘background information.’ He, however, does not create the circumstances for the open and active participation of the viewer. Giorgio Agamben analysed the relationship between the maker and the viewer by testifying: ‘the idea that extreme risk is implicit in the artistic activity.’ [v] Although the content of the videos can be described as open to collective interpretation, yet they seem to lack the ability to be experienced as works of art that can allude to the experiences, expectations and projections of the viewer, since they stand as personal documents of given situations. As the artist states: ‘This presentation, in all its complexity, multiple centers and tensions, is in a constant state of becoming; open to infinite possibilities and yet able to present one possibility at a time, which I believe mirrors the world as it is.’

Apart from the actual theme and content, Obstructions, brings up matters regarding the actual medium through which collective endeavours are presented. The true-to-life realism presented in the videos of Kazma, his involvement and engagement with the realm of inter-human relations in a post-industrial society, gives a humanistic overtone to the sheer complexity of the working methods that have developed in the past few years. In that sense, technology is not viewed as a means to an end but functions in the artist’s realm as an intermediate poetic practice which defines and puts reality into perspective. According to Nicolas Bourriaud: ‘in art, video signifies and demonstrates reality, the concreteness of a practice at times too dispersed and all over the place to be directly grasped … The camera turns into an instrument for questioning people … In other respects, video plays the same heuristic, exploratory role as the sketch played in the 19th century.’ [vi]

Despite the realistic, observational and analytical mode employed in the videos of Obstructions, the final impression of a poetic dramaturgy, of theatricality in the ‘making’ of every-day life is inevitable. Left with a behavioural and emotional response through my ‘ocular’ participation, while viewing the video Slaughterhouse it is rather inevitable not to recall the cinematic, poetic vocabulary of the apocalyptic scene of slaughter in the subjective, utopian atmosphere of In a Year of 13 Moons, 1978, of the great image-maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Regardless of any connotations or implications, however, one should always keep in mind Ali Kazma’s proposition: ‘The videos can be shown in different combinations. I am hoping each new addition and combination creates different tensions and readings of the whole.’


Ali Kazma’s exhibition Obstructions, curated by Emre Baykal, was held at Q-box gallery Athens from 18 February to 18 April 2009.


[i] From the artist’s statement.
[ii] Stefan Berg, Men in Black, Handbook of Curatorial Practice, Christoph Tannert/Ute Tischler (eds.), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2003.
[iii] Boris Groys, Art in the Age of Biopolitics, Documenta 11, Kassel, 8 June – 15 September 2001.
[iv] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962, p. 136.
[v] Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 2.
[vi] Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Les presses du reel, 1998.