ÖMER ALI KAZMA
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ÖMER ALI KAZMA
Ömer Ali Kazma begAn his career with a film-based language. His early works had culminated in She´s had it, a brilliantly reedited burst of appropriated footage of a critical sequence of the movie Snows of Kilimanjaro. The way he VJed the existing footage to let the suppressed narrative and the subtitles speak for themselves provided the structure for his later pieces where he both shot the footage and VJed. The work in the exhibition What Remains however, heralds a new position. The video consists of an 18-minute story from the life of the Galatasaray soccer team´s players and their coach Fatih Terim. Kazma and his colleague, nick-named the "moles" by the players, shot hundreds of hours of footage of situations the public will never have access to: The players in struggling and scuffling, before and after games, and on the road. From the first and longest shot of a single player making his way slowly through the corridor in the basement of the stadium towards the game ground, we are treated to the drama of young men in all their vulnerability, anguish, and ecstasy. One can hear only the echo of the player´s shoe pins hitting the stone in a moment of what is otherwise a total silence, moments before the cheers and curses of 40,000 fans set in. Soccer - what used to be a bonding institution of a neighborhood, a nation and all kinds of other allegiances - has positioned itself at the front end of the entertainment industry since the mid-1990ies. With television and satellite rights, corporate sponsorship deals, image designs, scary salaries, political clout, soccer is the only sports game that became a stepping stone for the owner of a team, Mr. Berlusconi who branded his party with a soccer based slogan "Forza Italia" and went on to win the elections in Italy! But, there is no game in Kazma´s video, we see only young men in occasional strives, head-butting intimately, or just being childish in horseplay. The coach roars at them like a father, a disciplinarian and a guru. They are young boys and gladiators at the same time with too much of a burden on their shoulders. What Remains is one of the most hypnotizingly emphatic works made on the theme of soccer in the last decade. Erden Kosova |