Alexander Ugay

KAZAKHSTAN, 1978

Born in Kazakhstan and of Korean descent, Alexander Ugay is part of a new generation of contemporary Central Asian artists and has exhibited his work extensively in the region as well as internationally. He works in various media, including digital painting, photography, video-performance, and filmmaking. The weight of Central Asian history and how it continues to impact contemporary reality is a sensibility that pervades the artist’s work. Central to his work is the use of memory and personal experience, realized in media.

Ugay studied in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, where he cofounded with Roman Maskalev in 2000, the creative group, “Bronepoezd” (“An Armored Train”). The group makes experimental work in 16mm film, using cameras manufactured in the former Soviet Union. The films are processed and edited manually, which gives them the look and feel of early cinema. This style has been called the New Romanticism, as it resembles and references the cinema of the Soviet avant-garde.

The topic of Ugay and Maskalev’s Cosmic Uncertainty is the 1960s space race, a time when the Soviet Union had achieved a pioneering role in science and technology. Employing a humorous and absurdist narrative, and with a nod to the 1902 film classic Journey to the Moon, the work offers a critique of the absurdist policies of the Soviet Union, implying that these paradigms have continued well into the present.

Bastion continues Ugay’s fascination with the former Soviet utopian ideals and their influence on future generations. This work deploys the image of Tatlin’s Tower—a central symbol of triumph for the newly founded USSR, an era characterized by revolutions, wars and public cataclysms. The symbol of Tatlin’s Tower also works on a personal level

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for Ugay due to his interest in the Russian vanguard and his reminiscence of the past. In this work, the artist combines several media, including Hi 8 video and a threedimensional architectural model to simulate the Tower, which was in actuality never built. The reenactments and various media used by Ugay are all seamlessly integrated into an elegiac and poetic video.

Original text by Yulia Sorokina Edited by Nurjahan Akhlaq