More Than Dreams, Less Than Things

Antiquated futuristic machines depicted in scientific magazines of the 1970s-80s have long fascinated Alexander Ugay for many reasons: their touching obsolescence, the utopian promise they used to hold, their hint at the hollowness of ideological structures, and the dark side of progress. How long does an object keep its status of a dream, a projection of desire, and what happens when it moves into the realm of the history of the future?  

 

As raw material for Ugay’s work, these obsolete mechanics relate to technological obsessions of colonial modernity and its strange desires while also commenting on ongoing mutations in photography today. 

 

In the ever-changing digital landscape of image production, the boundaries between technology, art, and science continue to blur, and Ugay explores the unknown territory where these domains intersect. The artist says that “the procedural nature of progress implies that all the latest media, sooner or later, will turn into ruins, embodying unfulfilled promises from the past, constantly replaced by the needs and desires of the present.” 

 

Generative photography, for example— a phenomenon of the current era—skips the use of light entirely, posing a question of whether it can be considered photography at all. And yet, its algorithmic principles can be traced back to camera obscura, another “generative” device used in Europe since the 16th century and introduced much earlier in the Arab world by Abu Ali Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, who depicted it in his Book of Optics. 

 

In this context, Ugay turns to the fundamental groundwork of the image-making: to the vibrant matter behind every image, the fluidity between particles and waves of light, and the sculptural qualities of photo emulsion. Rather than photographing things, he creates light-based objects or compositions, or plays with obsolete historic image carriers from the 20th century, such as VHS cassettes or 8mm film reels. This recording matter of colonial modernity serves both scientific and political ends, engaging in a profound interrogation of the terms on which image-making unfolds today, and musing on the fragility of diasporic knowledge and its material supports. 

 

Coming from a Korean diaspora in Kazakhstan, Ugay has long been attentive to the possibilities for understanding of diasporic uncertainties, disrupted figures, and pathways of migrations. In his poetically scientific world, photography can operate as a witness, as a station in the movements of electromagnetic waves, or as manifestation of his interest in the history of quantum mechanics. 

 

In his new work produced for the exhibition, the artist interrogates possible parallels between quantum physics and psychoanalysis, in particular, between Lacan’s concept of the signifier and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in the act of observation and interpretation.

 

This is the first work of a photo series where the optical laws first described by Abu Ali Al-Hasan function as active structures through which perception itself is shaped. In this work, light shines through text, and thus, the camera obscura no longer acts as an instrument of reflection but a device of cleavage. The text tears the light, the light dissects the image, and the observer becomes a participant in a game between the signifier and its shadow.

 

– Elena Sorokina, curator