Ali Kaaf: The Fire’s Edge

Ayyam Gallery presents Ali Kaaf’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The display brings together key works, including the Rift, Helmet, and “Ras Ras” series, outlining an interdisciplinary approach and a consistent exploration of medium and form.

“The Fire’s Edge” considers the fragile boundary where ancestral practices meet contemporary erasure. Fire, once a tool of care and renewal, is now often framed as threat or waste. This threshold marks both the line between scorched and fertile ground and the diminishing space where knowledge, ritual, and ecology once converged, suggesting a reflection on disappearance, persistence, and the shadow cast by destruction and extraction.

Kaaf’s practice relies on dichotomies such as density and void, discipline and spontaneity, and past and present. Through precise gestures, forms emerge that remain open to interpretation. The exhibition treats this threshold as a site of tension and transition, using materials like paper, charcoal, ink, and fire through patient and deliberate methods.

In the “Ras Ras” series, fire alters the surface, creating contrasts between beauty and destruction, where voids replace expected faces and evoke an absence of thought or presence. The Helmet series reflects on ancient wartime headgear through blown glass, suggesting the fragility of memory and its endurance over time. Links between series appear through recurring burns, borders, and movements, with fire remaining central across Kaaf’s practice.