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, including the forced migration of his ethnically Korean family from the Russian Far East to central Asia in 1937.

Using specially developed multi-aperture pinhole cameras, Ugay registers geographically dispersed sites of historical or cultural significance as layers of light on photosensitive paper. For Obscuraton 2022, featured in the Triennial, the artist employed this technique to photographically merge locations in Korea and Kazakhstan — a way to negotiate the experience of displacement from a lost homeland and explore the potential for new modes of belonging.

This project is supported by the Commonwealth through the Australia-Korea Foundation, part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This project is also supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of Korea, Korea Arts Management Service, and the grant program Fund for Korean Art Abroad.