We are pleased to present The Fire’s Edge, Ali Kaaf’s first solo exhibition at Ayyam Gallery. This exhibition features the artist’s seminal body of work, including his Rift series, alongside selected works from his Helmet and Ras Ras series. These bodies of work highlight Kaaf’s interdisciplinary approach and exploration of medium and form.
About the exhibition
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.
About the artist
Creating works on paper, paintings, glass works, videos and installations, Ali Kaaf explores the infinite ways of seeing matter and void. Positive and negative shapes; the contrasts between black and white; and the transformative quality of consuming and eroding forms all give his work a variety of emotive qualities that can be sober or even painful.
Ali Kaaf, born in 1977 in Oran, Algeria to Syrian parents, lives and works in Berlin. He graduated from the Institut des Beaux-Arts in Beirut, Lebanon, and continued his studies at Universität der Künste (UdK) in Berlin under the supervision of Professors Marwan Kassab Bachi and Rebecca Horn.
Interested in the materiality of the work itself, Kaaf creates media with blacked out sections, holes, burns and cuts. The various series take on an evolving yet repetitious theme of presence and absence, which he explains, is necessary “visually and in relation to the emptiness. Repetition of the form takes me to something new.” Influenced by Sufism, his consistent pattern has a spiritual quality, an introspection that transmits the ideas of scars, loss and grief.
In 2004, he was awarded the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Prize for Outstanding International Students assigned by UdK in Berlin. He was also awarded the Young Collectors for MAXXI prize by the Young Collectors Association in Rome in 2010, and in 2014 he was awarded the Honorary AIR Award by the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley.
He previously showed his work in numerous solo exhibitions such as at Darat al Funun-The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman (2004); the Khan Ashad-Bacha, Damascus in collaboration with Goethe Institute (2006); Solidere, Beirut (2005); Galerie Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (2008); Galleria Marie-Laure Fleisch in Rome (2009); Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, USA (2010); the Moontower Foundation in Bad König-Zell in Germany (2013); C&K Gallery, Berlin (2020); the Pergamon Museum, Berlin (2021); and at Documenta 15 in Kassel (2022). He was artist in residence at the German Foreign Office through the Berlin Gallery Association’s Artist in Residence Program in 2022 and at Darat al Funun in Amman, Jordan in 2023.
Kaaf has also exhibited at venues such as the Contemporary Art Museum, Maribor, Slovenia; Villa Grisebach, Berlin; Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Palma, Spain. His work has been acquired by institutions such as Collection Solidere, Beirut; MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma; Moontower Foundation, Frankfurt; Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin and Peter-Raue-Collection, Berlin.
