Bogdan Ablozhnyy
Frieze London
15–19 October 2025
Preview: Wednesday 15 October, 11 am–7 pm


a. SQUIRE is pleased to announce the gallery’s first participation in Frieze London with a presentation of six works by Bogdan Ablozhnyy which orchestrate a critical analysis of the rhetorics of images.
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Backgrounding the sculptural mise-en-scène is Sigmund Freud’s 1915 study, ‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psycho-Analytical Theory of the Disease’. The text concerns a young woman entwined in a secret affair with her colleague. “She declared that this man had abused her confidence by getting unseen witnesses to photograph them while they were making love,” Freud recounts, “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.” By a series of predictable leaps, the analyst associates the subject’s “paranoia” with homosexuality, and her fixation on the phantom click of the camera shutter with the sonic projection of her disavowed desires.
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In Ablozhnyy’s intricate diegesis, the narrative is resampled and its constitutive elements plotted as a bedroom scenography of prop-accomplices. The booth is a diagram; the works are its vertices. Photographic apparatuses combine with indices of sound to schematise the trauma site encountered through the real. Materials—a shutter, the flash of a camera, a rubber viewing hood, musical instrument parts, London Blue topazes, a locked case, selenite crystals, leatherette, a zipper—occupy an ambiguous connotative space between fetish and function, desire and lack. The latter operates here not merely as the absence of something but also as a fundamental condition of subjectivity itself. Desire arises from this lack—it is the longing for something that is always just out of reach, perpetually deferred. Ablozhnyy draws out his interests in the found object’s photographic legacy, converting distinct stages of image production into precise spatial articulations; affect and its psychological implications are refocused via photography theory, aesthetics, and art history.
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Bogdan Ablozhnyy (b. 1994) received a Meisterschüler degree in Fine Arts from Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, and is currently completing graduate studies in Visual Art at the University of California, Riverside. Selected exhibitions include Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nuremberg (solo, forthcoming); a. SQUIRE, London (solo, forthcoming); nièce, Nice/Paris (forthcoming); Emmanuel Layr, Vienna (2025); a. SQUIRE, London (2025); Mink, Frankfurt am Main (2025); Rinde am Rhein, Düsseldorf (2024); Baleno International, Rome (2024); Capc musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux (2022–2023); Elvira, Frankfurt am Main (2021); and Baleno International, Rome (solo, 2021). Ablozhnyy lives and works in Los Angeles.