Beyond the Threshold of the Visible: The Photographic Objects of Alexander Ugay

Abstract

One of the features of photography is the fact that the process of formation of the image is invisible — in contrast to painting. It is as if photography, which makes the world more visible, evades visual control. The transition to digital techniques partly reduces this “dark side” of photography, but it also allows us to make better sense of analogous photography and reflect on its dual nature. Alexander Ugay, a contemporary artist from Kazakhstan, who in his practice shifts from photography as an image to photography as an object, substance and process, is an example of such a reflection; the thematization of the nature of the medium is combined in his practice with the theme of memory and oblivion. In his Objects of Memory (2013), he photographed the back of pictures from several archives of the Stalinist camps — the procedure that emphasizes the material and ephemeral character of the prints. The iconic aspect is almost entirely excluded from Time Capsule (2011 — present time) that reveals the self-destructive nature of the act of taking picture. The series of “obscuratons” (2017–2018) — complex pinhole cameras with a lot of holes — is a preliminary result of this reflection of photographic dialectics of the visible and the invisible. Every obscuraton functions alternately as a devise for creating an image (equivalent to human vision) and as an object integrated in some environment side by side with the other things. The polemics with an idea of total visual control can be read here; the machines of vision prove to be machines of blindness. The general impression is that the sole purpose of the emphasis on physical and chemical processes, the use of the particular iconographic resources and references to historical realities have a single goal in Ugay’s projects: the dissolution of meanings and disintegration of forms.