“Time to Time” offers a mini-retrospective of Ali Kazma’s industrial videography that has been calibrated to the city of Bursa, with its working-class landscape of factories and farms. The nine videos on display here explore the overlaps between organic and machine processes, highlighting the aesthetics of functionalism.
Within a spacious ground-floor hall steeped in darkness, Kazma’s eight-minute three-channel video Tea Time, 2017, glows with the fluid inferno of a major glassware workshop. Through the percussive soundtrack, the artist channels the repetitious mechanization of material production, while the crisply edited sequences of burning cogs, levers, and gears orchestrate a shadow play of modern consumer engineering. Installed in the stairway, Clerk, 2011, provides an apt transition from the stark machinery of Tea Time to the portraits that await on the second floor. In the video, the flash of a notary clerk’s stamp hammers onto a thick stack of paper for a three-and-a-half-minute exercise in human automation.
The seven videos that follow take the viewer from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to the home of bibliophile Alberto Manguel, a closed prison, a remote lighthouse, a taxidermy office, and the ateliers of artists Sarkis and Füsun Onur. Kazma conveys his themes and subjects not merely as objects moving through space, but as a network of ideas and emotions, capable of inhabiting even the coldest, most inhuman, and most individualized of spaces.
— Matt Hanson