11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Artwork 0000 / Caption NOTE 1 Alexander Ugay, interviewed by Elsbeth Dekker and Robbie Schweiger, ‘An unknown return: A conversation with Alexander Ugay’, Stedelijk Studies Journal , issue 12, 11 January 2023, <stedelijkstudies.com/journal/ an-unknown-return-alexander-ugay>, viewed March 2024. BORN 1978, KYZYLORDA, KAZAKHSTAN LIVES+WORKS INALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN +SEOUL, SOUTHKOREA Alexander Ugay creating Obscuraton 2022 / Image courtesy: The artist Obscuraton 2022 / Camera obscura, gelatin silver photographs, inkjet prints, custom plinth / Camera obscura: 90 x 90 x 76cm (installed); 9 inkjet prints: 70 x 80cm (8 prints); 50 x 160cm / Courtesy: The artist / Photograph: Kaelan Burkett ALEXANDERUGAY Photographer, filmmaker and installation artist Alexander Ugay uses a mixture of new and outmoded technologies to explore the relationship between historical memory, nostalgia, current realities and future possibilities. A third- generation member of Kazakhstan’s Koryo-saram community, Ugay bases much of his work on narratives and recollections of the Soviet era, collected through research and conversations, with a focus on migrant experience and resonances of place in the collective imagination. While Ugay established his practice in experimental film and expanded cinema, using Soviet-era 8mm and 16mm technology to create sculptural ‘cinema objects’, his recent practice has shifted into combinations of installations and photography he describes as ‘obscuratons’. The obscuratons make use of multi-aperture pinhole cameras developed by Ugay to register sites of historical or cultural significance as layers of light on photosensitive paper. These locations can be overlaid by alternately opening and closing different apertures at different sites, in a compression of time and space. The resulting images are presented in sculptural forms that reference legacies and current realities of labour, memory and ideology. For his 2022 work Obscuraton , Ugay used this technique to merge two different places significant to his own Koryo-saram community. Also known in South Korea as Koryoin, and elsewhere as ‘Soviet Koreans’, Koryo-saram people are descendants of ethnically Korean people forcibly transmigrated to Central Asia from their homes in Russia’s far-eastern territories under Stalinist policies in 1937. As many as 40 000 of nearly 172 000 Koryo- saram are estimated to have died in their first years of exile, as subsistence farming techniques failed in a vastly different climate and they were forced into makeshift accommodation. Using half of his camera’s 52 apertures, Ugay first documented Dumangang River on the border between North Korea and Russia, an important crossing point for Korean migrants fleeing famine during the nineteenth century. With the remaining 26 apertures, he overlaid this with photographs of Mount Bastobe in Kazakhstan, one of the sites marking the terminal point of the harrowing journey. Utilising the unconventional shapes and angles of machinic labour — in particular, the stamping machines he operated while employed as a factory worker in South Korea — Ugay places layered reminders of a distant homeland and traumatic past within the context of work that is the daily reality of many Koryoin who choose to return to their ancestral homeland. Accompanying the display of pinhole photographs is the camera itself, its unusual shape emphasised by being presented in exploded form, like a physically realised technical diagram. The camera is not only the mechanism for creating Ugay’s haunting images, but also becomes the means for presenting them, as its detached walls become further surfaces onto which the photographs are layered. This ambiguity of function mimics the inherent obscurity and fragility of pinhole photography, as well as the experience of displacement imbuing the depiction of a lost homeland. There is a melancholy to this realisation, but also, for Ugay, the potential for creating new modes of belonging. As he has put it: An unknown homeland, like a lost paradise, does not exist in the regular world. One cannot return to a homeland as to the promised land, because this place exists solely in time and imagination rather than in actual space. An unknown return lies in the ability to detect forms of collectivity different from existing ones. To find ways to be Korean beyond the stigma of ‘North and South’ or ‘friend or foe’; to do justice to differences, while maintaining the need for shared forms of life. 1 REUBENKEEHAN ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 200 — 201