Alexander Ugay, More than Dreams, Less than Things
16th March, 2025 – 17th May, 2025
NIKA Project Space Paris
43 Rue de la Commune de Paris,
93230, Romainville
France
NIKA Project Space will open More than Dreams, Less than Things on 16 March, a solo exhibition by Alexander Ugay, curated by Elena Sorokina. The exhibition, held at NIKA’s Paris space, explores the intersection of photography, technology, and diasporic memory, reflecting on the evolving role of images in an era increasingly shaped by generative photography.
Ugay, an artist of Korean descent born in Kazakhstan, has long examined the materiality of images and their relationship to historical and ideological frameworks. Rather than capturing objects through traditional photography, he constructs light-based compositions and repurposes obsolete image carriers of the 20th century—from VHS tapes to 8mm film—investigating their significance as both mnemonic devices and political artefacts.
Courtesy of the artist
The exhibition brings together a selection of Ugay’s earlier works alongside new collages and objects, through which he considers unexpected parallels between quantum physics and psychoanalysis. Central to his inquiry is the tension between Jacques Lacan’s theory of the signifier and Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, particularly as they relate to acts of observation and interpretation.
For this latest body of work, Ugay draws inspiration from the Book of Optics, a seminal text by the medieval Arab scholar Ibn al-Haytham, known in the West as Alhazen. The treatise, one of the earliest to describe the principles of camera obscura, serves as both a conceptual and material foundation for Ugay’s photographic series. In these images, light filters through the book’s text, producing layered, abstract compositions.
Courtesy of the artist
“All the works presented at the exhibition—to some extent—address the reverse side of the image,” Ugay explains. “In 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 manifest when light passes through the slits of the signifier. This opposition reveals the structural relation between quantum indeterminacy and the cleavage work of the signifier in psychoanalysis.”
Ugay has been working with NIKA Project Space since the gallery’s inception in 2023, appearing in multiple exhibitions, including Fragments of Time Unending and Coded Gestures. His ongoing collaboration with the gallery underscores its commitment to fostering artistic dialogue with practitioners from underrepresented regions, while providing a platform for critical inquiry and experimental creative processes.
Alexander Ugay, More than Dreams, Less than Things opens on the 16th of March, 2025 until the 17th of May, 2025 at NIKA Project Space Paris
©2025 NIKA Project Space Paris
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