Future Nostalgia: Alexander Ugay’s Parisian Debut at NIKA Project Space
Have you ever had that feeling of “Future Nostalgia” - as Dua Lipa would put it – when looking at old sci-fi movies that imagined a future that never came to pass? The fact that this future didn’t materialise might be as might be seen as both a blessing and a disappointment, as artist Alexander Ugay has us reflecting upon with his Parisian debut. Born in Kazakhstan to a Korean family deported under Stalin’s regime, Ugay’s work is heavily inspired by his own experience and is layered with echoes of ancestral trauma, the faded promise of Soviet modernity, and the flickering ghost of a future once imagined but that never fully came to fruition. A child of engineers and inventors, Ugay grew up among circuits and cyanotypes, and in his art, he uses materials such as 8mm film and VHS tape. With this vintage spirit, his body of work looks at the past to speak of the present, and posits a critique of the techno-utopianism of the Soviet 1970s, as much as today's AI-driven image culture. In his new show, More than Dreams, Less than Things, at NIKA Project Space Paris, Ugay looks at the origins of image-making both literally and philosophically. Inspired by Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics, the artist reanimates the ancient camera obscura, letting light seep through the book’s pages to birth abstract images: faded records of a presence. The exhibition, which opened on March 16, explores the tension between technological progress and the way this can be disrupted by the power of imagination and poetry - eminently human things - by looking at the intersection of photography, technology, and diasporic memory. His show, curated by Elena Sorokina, situates an emergence of Central Asian narratives coming more and more to the forefront of the international art and cultural world of Europe. Through the lens of Soviet futurism, Ugay explores a broader vision of seeing in an age where so much remains invisible. TCA spoke with Ugay about the way he approaches his art, his sources, and how he conceives images not as finished objects but as processes — mutable, unstable, and deeply human. [caption id="attachment_30561" align="aligncenter" width="2560"] 03_Alexander Ugay, More than Dreams, Less than Things. Courtesy of the artist[/caption] TCA: Where does the title for your new show, More than Dreams, Less than Things, come from? The title came about after reading Henri Bergson's book, Matter and Memory. I really liked the idea that an image is not only the relationship between absence and presence but also intensity and density. This idea made up for my dissatisfaction with the notion of resolution in photography. The title, in this case, is not just a definition of the image but a key to understanding its substantive basis. The image is the surface of the ‘grand contract’ between necessity and freedom, memory and matter, entropy and being. TCA: In More than Dreams, Less than Things, you use the camera obscura technique. How does this historical process relate to your exploration...
