Ali Kazma: Book

The first photograph exhibition by Ali Kazma in Turkey: “Book” opens at Galeri Nev Istanbul on September 11.  The works in the exhibition were compiled from the archive of Ali Kazma comprised of more than eight thousand photographs taken in libraries, bookshops, print houses, bookbinderies and many other places related to books by curator Régis Durand.   Alongside the exhibition, a book with Régis Durand’s text on Ali Kazma’s work will also be presented to the audience.

Photographs organized around thematic categories by Régis Durand invite the audience to reconsider the production processes of books and the nature of places at which readers and books meet.

According to Régis Durand, Ali Kazma whose art is about work as such only in appearance aims to make the activity of reading visible through photography. His focus on the materiality of the book is of course a way of reducing the strangeness and alterity rooted in the nature of books.  But it is also a way of bringing the work into a world with which Kazma is familiar, that of production, know-how and precision.  The book photographed by Kazma is not an empty or anonymous shell, it is a flesh-and-blood object that lives in the particular biotope that is the library, where it has its assigned place, a place that makes sense in this ensemble, and does not consist in simply occupying a certain space. Ali Kazma’s materialist vision of the world of the book dialectically refers to what grounds it, that is to say, the inner life of books and the energy of knowledge.

The presentation of the book project “Recto-Verso” published by édition Take 5 and realized in collaboration with Ali Kazma, Alberto Manguel, Philippe Apeloig and Jean-Luc Honegger took place during Paris Photo 2012. “Recto-Verso” included a compilation of photographs from Ali Kazma’s archive on which the artist had been working more than three years at that time. The artist has been continuing to add to his archive since then. A copy of the limited edition book is included in Prints & Illustrated Books Collection at MoMA in New York beside many other international collections.