The Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (NMNM) has released a new programme, ‘Winter Video Days’, dedicated to video and digital art, two of the newcomers to contemporary art, with the first edition showcasing works by Turkish video artist, Ali Kazma.
The Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (NMNM) has released a new programme, ‘Winter Video Days’ dedicated to video art and digital art, two of the newcomers to contemporary art, with the first edition showcasing works by Turkish video artist, Ali Kazma.
The world is forever changing and the art scene is no exception. In a bid to keep abreast of new and innovative trends, ‘Winter Video Days’ presents the first exhibition, a series of video artworks by Ali Kazma.
Kazma, a video and photography artist, uses his work to “raise fundamental questions about the meaning of human activities”. The videos and editing are all the work of Kazma himself and, according to the NMNM, “whether in the fields of economics, industry, science, medicine, society or art, each of his videos questions the developments that take place in our societies, and together gradually represent a vast archive of the human condition.”
The exhibition – continuing until January 15th in Villa Sauber – gives the viewer a look at three different videos.
– Top Fuel (2020), a short video dedicated to Anita Mäkelä, Finnish drag racer, also includes a series of photographs taken during the process.
– House of Ink (2022) and Sentimental (2022) were filmed with Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and serve to show the audience how “the least cinematic of activities – writing – can be translated into images” while covering the topics of creativity and imagination.
Born in Istanbul in 1971 and obtaining his master’s degree from the New School University in New York, Ali Kazma has had numerous solo exhibitions worldwide and his works are currently included in collections such as CNAP (Paris), Istanbul Modern, MEP (Paris), MONA (Tasmania), Sztuki Museum (Lodz), Tate Modern (London), TBA21 (Vienna), Fondation Louis Vuitton collection (Paris) and the VKV Foundation collection (Istanbul).
Complementing the exhibition is a novel-style catalogue containing an introduction, illustrations from the artist’s work, and an interview by the curator of the exhibition, Guillaume de Sardes. Additionally, at 6.30pm Thursday January 12th, de Sardes will moderate a discussion between Ali Kazma and art historian Paul Ardenne at the periphery of the exhibition.
Photo credit: Stephane Dana, Government Communication Department