Resistance > Artist Ali Kazma > Representing Turkey at the 55th Biennale di Venezia > June 1 - November 24

Curated by Emre Baykal, the Pavilion of Turkey is located at Artiglierie, Arsenale, one of the main venues of the biennale.

Ali Kazma’s multi-channel video installation “Resistance” explores the interventions and strategies that both release the body from its own restrictions and restrict it in order to control it. As an extensive survey on the contemporary discourses, techniques and management tactics developed for the human body, “Resistance” is an attempt to unravel the interventions imposed and practised on the body today.

“Resistance” evolved out of “Obstructions”, another series Ali Kazma began to produce in 2005 to explore the ways in which the body is shaped today through scientific, cultural and social tools, and how as a performance site it is repeatedly reproduced. In other words, “Resistance” conveys the productive activity of the body as a creative force directly onto the body itself: the producer and the produced, the shaper and the shaped are united in the materiality of the body.

Ali Kazma > Resistance > 2013

 During the almost one-year long filming process of “Resistance”, Ali Kazma visited various sites to record the processes that both construct and control the body. He contemplates the human being’s struggle to break the social, cultural, physical and genetic codes of the human body, as well as the processes during which the body is transformed into a conveyor of new symbols and meanings.

In this comprehensive project, Ali Kazma worked in various parts of the world in different settings and with different subjects: a film set in Paris, a prison in Sakarya, a school and a hospital operating room in Istanbul, a cryonics institution in the US, a neurorobotics research laboratory at a university in Berlin, a medical research laboratory in Lausanne, and a tattoo studio in London, just to name a few. 

 

Ali Kazma > Video Still, Resistance >2013

The book that accompanies Ali Kazma’s video installation “Resistance” is published by İKSV and Yapı Kredi Publications, and designed by Esen Karol who has also designed the communication material of the project. The bilingual book will be launched during the opening of the pavilion and subsequently be sold in major bookstores.

Organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), the Pavilion of Turkey is sponsored by FIAT and realised with the contribution of The Promotion Fund of the Turkish Prime Ministry, under the auspices of Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. SAHA Association provided production support for the Pavilion of Turkey.