The thing bears up the world, any old “thing” bears up and exists together with the cultural, historical
and social imprints of the world it occupies. In a “thing” we read the cultural organization from which
it has arisen. A pair of blue jeans, a watch, an ipod, a frying pan, a hospital, a slaughterhouse—they
all tell us what kind of world they have emerged from, and because they carry the imprints of history
they also elucidate and show to us the historicity of that “world”. In the act of everyday use we don’t
notice this. We pass by unheeding, without seeing that the “thing” bears up the “world”, that it is a
sign of time, that history becomes concrete and gains existence in that “thing”.

When I say that Ali’s work introduces and points to the relationship between the world and the
thing, what I mean is “everything”. Nothing gains existence without entering the violent, terrible,
ominous maelstrom of techne/the technical. Everything – animate, inanimate, human, animal, soil,
mineral, plant, pebble, every “thing” – in order to be named and become a “thing”, to gain existence,
emerge and be visible must undergo a technical organization and articulation. What we call the
world, that place where things gain substance and show themselves, earning the possibility to exist
in space and time, is in fact an articulation organized according to a law, one that cannot be named
or grasped in a single representation. In Ali’s work this organization, that is, the “world”, exhibits
itself as the law-governed rhythmic motion of the birth/production processes of things.

[Suna Ertuğrul, from the text written for the exhibiton Obstructions at Kazım Taskent Gallery.]