Upcoming
Paris Photo 2026
Grand Palais
Art Fair Details
From historical works to contemporary and digital practices, its scope has expanded alongside broader shifts in photography over the past three decades. The introduction of curated sectors has progressively structured the fair, highlighting emerging scenes, publishing and new forms of image-making.
Held annually in Paris, the fair has developed in parallel with the transformations of the medium, bringing into conversation different periods, geographies and artistic approaches.
Location
Public Hours:
NIKA Project Space presents a two-artist booth bringing together Alexander Ugay and Sevil Tunaboylu, whose practices expand the boundaries of photography through material, historical, and conceptual inquiry.
At the core of the presentation is a shared investigation of the image as a site of memory, reconstruction, and transformation. Both artists engage with archival material—personal and collective—while questioning the status of the photographic image in an era of technological and ideological shifts.
Sevil Tunaboylu presents works derived from her long-term archive Cake Eaters, a personal collection of family photographs accumulated since her adolescence. Rather than working within photography itself, Tunaboylu translates these images into painting, layering them with references from literature, national history, and contemporary social realities. Her practice navigates the intersections of personal narrative and broader political structures, addressing themes such as migration, education, and collective memory in Turkey. Positioned within the context of a photography fair, her work challenges the medium from within—reasserting painting as a critical space for the reconstitution of photographic memory.
Alexander Ugay approaches photography as both material and concept. Working across analogue and digital processes, Ugay creates what he describes as “light-based objects,” often using obsolete media such as VHS tapes or 8mm film alongside contemporary technologies. His practice reflects on the afterlives of images and the ideological frameworks embedded within technological progress. Drawing on his background as part of the Korean diaspora in Central Asia, Ugay explores the fragility of memory, the loss of language, and the reconstruction of history through images.
The booth features two key bodies of work. The first, Book of Optics, investigates obsolete technological imaginaries drawn from Soviet-era scientific imagery, questioning the utopian promises and eventual obsolescence of progress. The second, related to his ongoing Unknown Return project, previously presented at Albertina Museum, engages with AI-generated imagery as a tool for reconstructing lost diasporic archives. Based on the only surviving photograph of the artist’s Korean great-grandmother, neural networks generate speculative portraits and scenes, evoking absence, displacement, and the instability of historical truth, and imagining a fictional life of the Korean diaspora in Kazakhstan as it might have been, given that very little documentation has survived.
Together, Tunaboylu and Ugay propose a dialogue between image and memory, where photography is no longer understood as a fixed medium but as a mutable field shaped by translation, loss, and reconstruction. The booth reflects on how images persist, transform, and fail—becoming both evidence and fiction in the ongoing negotiation of personal and collective histories.
