Ruins are everywhere in Ali Kazma’s works. Most of them are modern ruins, in the double
meaning of remains of recently built artifacts and ruins of modernity itself – needless to say
this has nothing to do with the so-called “post-modernity”.

And even recent and active buildings or devices, like the seeds storage or the big oil pipes
are already to be seen as ruins to be – again not necessarily in a dreadful way, not in the
romantic mode of Edgar Poe’s raven, but as embodying for the future an active
remembrance of what once was, like sign-posts in the flow of time.

These ruins are not, or not only nor specifically the ruin of capitalism, I’d rather say the ruin
of modernity (to which capitalism is obviously strongly related).

Modernity means here a certain vision of the world, and of the place of mankind in the
world, mostly based on the idea of progress as a constantly moving forward trend. Again,
there is no nostalgia here, no feeling of “it was better before”.

There is the intense attempt to re-interrogate the present and the future through listening
to a multiplicity of voices, many of them coming from various kinds of past.

[Jean-Michel Frodon, from his talk at Jeu de Paume, 2018.]