Clerk, 2011

Ali Kazma’s works seem to possess an ancient honesty that art has progressively lost over the course of the past century—the honesty of describing life with exactitude and candor. One might call him a documentarian, but in reality he possesses a dedication and social awareness that was typical of realists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work is characterized by a spirit of passionate observation of all the processes whereby man modifies, constructs, and changes the environment and is changed by it, without this observation being transformed into judgment or complicity. Even looking at the activities of employees in a slaughterhouse, Kazma employs the same objective and meticulous narration that he devotes to a watchmaker or a surgeon. [...]