Alexander Ugay: More than Dreams, Less than Things

NIKA Project Space is pleased to announce the opening of More than Dreams, Less than Things, a solo exhibition by Alexander Ugay, curated by Elena Sorokina. Opening on 16 March at NIKA’s Paris space, the exhibition delves into the intersection of photography, technology, and diasporic memory, examining the shifting status of images in an era of rapid evolution of generative photography.

An artist of Korean descent born in Kazakhstan, Ugay has long explored the materiality of images and their relationship to historical and ideological structures. Rather than photographing things, Ugay creates light-based objects and compositions or plays with historic image carriers of the 20th century —from VHS tapes to 8mm film—examining their role as both memory tools and political artifacts.

This exhibition will feature some of Ugay’s earlier works, as well as new collages and objects through which the artist interrogates possible parallels between quantum physics and psychoanalysis. More specifically, Ugay explores the tension between French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan’s work around the signifier and German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in the act of observation and interpretation.

In the new work created for the exhibition, Ugay uses the legendary “Book of Optics”, written by the medieval Arab scholar Ibn al-Haytham, called in the West Alhazen, which includes one of the earliest descriptions of camera obscura. Ugay’s new photographic series is created by camera obscura, in which the light shines through the Book’s text, generating multilayered abstract images.

Ugay says: “All the works presented at the exhibition - to some extent - address the reverse side of the image. In the project The Book of Optics, this is realised through the dualism of the geometrical optics of the camera obscura and wave optics, the properties of which are manifested at the moment of light passing through the slits of the signifier. This opposition reveals the structural relation between quantum indeterminacy and the cleavage work of the signifier in psychoanalysis.”