The Fire’s Edge: Ali Kaaf

The Fire’s Edge evokes the fragile threshold where ancestral practices meet modern erasure. In many pre-industrial societies, fire was a tool of care and renewal, now recast as danger or waste. This edge marks not only the line between scorched earth and fertile soil, but also the vanishing space where knowledge, ritual, and ecology once intertwined.

Through this lens, the title of the exhibition suggests a meditation on disappearance and persistence, on how destruction, drought, and extraction cast a shadow over the possibility of renewal.

Ali Kaaf’s practice is based on the dichotomies that make sense of life; his works stand at the intersection of density and void, past and present, discipline and spontaneity, and fragmentation and wholeness. Through precise individual strokes, the artist creates vibrant forms that come to life. Ali’s forms are open to interpretation. The exhibition explores this threshold as a space of tension, transition, and possibility. While using primal elements such as paper, charcoal, fire, and ink, Kaaf’s technique is patient and deliberate. Ali empties the work from itself, giving darkness and density a space to breathe.

Kaaf’s photographic works, like his other manipulated media, explore the tension between control and the natural force of material. In the Ras Ras series, the medium is manipulated by fire. This material conflict highlights a contrast between beauty and destruction. Where faces should emerge, blank voids take their place, further referencing the idea of a mental emptiness or, more precisely, the absence of freedom of thought.

The Helmet series explores the intersection of past and present by reflecting on ancient wartime headgear that now serves as a memory of both history and its wearer. Made of blown glass, the helmets evoke the fragility of memory—something that endures beyond its time and is preserved across generations. Much like Kaaf’s use of paper in the Rift series—a material that is both resilient and inherently delicate—glass becomes a poetic vessel for themes of endurance and vulnerability. The contrasting treatments inflicted on these helmets by Kaaf reveal a shared essence: vulnerability.

Through material choices, Kaaf imbues fragility into an enduring symbol, one that has withstood the passage of time, unlike the mortal bodies it was meant to protect. The borders and burns tie Ali’s practices together. Movements in the Rift series are seen in his glass-blown sculptures, and the photographic imagery from the Ras Ras series, where fire is, once again, an integral part of the process.