In Freud’s “A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Theory of the Disease” a young woman had asked him to protect her from the molestations of a man who had drawn her into a love-affair. She declared that this man had abused her confidence by getting unseen witnesses to photograph them while they were making love, and that by exhibiting these pictures it was now in his power to bring disgrace on her and force her to resign the post she occupied. In his talk Bogdan Ablozhnyy will look at Freud’s 1915 case through the lens of photography theory and its relation with desire, death and lack and its traces in his art practice as well as the affinity between paranoia and homosexuality in Freud’s interpretation, where the sound of a shutter appears to be a sonic projection of a patient’s disordered desire. Ablozhnyy has been researching the vast collection of California Museum of Photography throughout the past months for production of a new body of work and will present some objects from the archives as a part of his presentation. His interest lies in exploration of found object’s photographic legacy and in transforming distinct stages of image production to a new physical dimension where affect and its psychological implications are being explored within the realm of critical theory, aesthetics and art history.

Bogdan Ablozhnyy’s practice is critically engaged with the rhetoric of an image and exists at the intersection of sculpture and photography, often finding form in arrangements that occupy multiple spatial and signification levels. While the imagery, objects and physical spaces that Ablozhnyy create are often directed at such states as lack, fracture, absence, loss and illusion he tries to escape any sort of unilateral categorization and extract imagery from the most personal of experiences – moments from his own life, but also – and perhaps more hauntingly – those that belonged to others.

Bogdan Ablozhnyy received a Meisterschüler degree in Fine Arts from Städelschule, Frankfurt Germany and is currently doing graduate studies in Visual Art at UCR. Bogdan Ablozhnyy lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
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Programs at UCR ARTS are supported by the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at UCR and by the City of Riverside.