ALI KAAF, ARTIST

Tomas Fitzel of rbb Kultur visited Ali Kaaf on the rooftop studio of the Federal Foreign Office shortly before the outbreak of the epidemic and recorded this in an audio report. 

UNFORTUNATELY WE HAVE TO CANCEL THIS EVENT DUE TO GIVEN REASONS.

Dear friends of the Museum for Islamic Art,

We would like to invite you to the Studio Visit with Ali Kaaf on April 16th at 6 p.m. at the Federal Foreign Office.

From February to April the artist will be exhibited with his project "The Byzantine Corner" as part of the AArtist in Residence program. The AArtist in Residence Programme is the first residency programme in a German Federal Ministry in cooperation with the Landesverband Berliner Galerien (lvbg). Each year a jury of independent experts selects three artists who are invited to spend three months in the roof studio of the Federal Foreign Office. The residency is primarily aimed at artists who come from abroad or who deal intensively with global issues in their work. 

In his project "The Byzantine Corner" Kaaf uses his subtle, meditative and mostly abstract visual language to deal with the fields of tension and utopias of different cultures against the background of his biography. Based on photographs taken by the artist of the Byzantine Corner in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, he uses this architectural element to investigate the overlapping of the most diverse lines of tradition as well as of past and present. Kaaf will continue to develop the series of works on paper of the same name, in which he interweaves various artistic methods such as photography, collage, montage, editing, drawing and digital processes in a multi-layered way, and bring them into the room in an installation and a video. Here, too, the fragmentation of elements remains characteristic, pointing to a fragmentation of existence, whereby the decomposition is led to a new wholeness. There are no clear demarcations between cultures, they flow into each other, influence each other, take over traditions, change each other, make them disappear and create something new. Integration is thus not something static, but an organic migration, part of history and present.

Location: The meeting point and entrance is at Kurstraße 36, 10117 Berlin.
Time: 16.04.2020, 6 p.m.
Number of participants: 15

FOR MEMBERS ONLY: Registration at info@fmik.de stating first and last name is required by 02.03.2020.

You are requested to show up on time and to carry a valid photo identification to the admission control.