Bogdan Ablozhnyy
Pedestrian Space
6 June–18 July 2026
Opening: Friday 5 June, 6–8 pm

‍
The “pedestrian space” typology was, for its inventor, the late artist Fred Sandback, a way to produce “utopian glimmerings of art and life cohabiting”; to have his material incisions out there with everything else in the world. About the paradoxicality of this art-immanent desire to exit itself, Tom Holert once wrote that leaving the realm of art, however symbolic that may be, means that the artist renounces the obligation to autonomy imposed on him by society. At the same time, it does not require the artist to take on direct social accountability: as an artist, he can, in turn, make himself available to the public in a merely symbolic sense.

In Pedestrian Space, a new exhibition by Bogdan Ablozhnyy, we are not following Sandback out into the open.

Instead of leaving one for the other, Ablozhnyy expresses the gaps between art and life by producing more of them, more differences, lacks; by merging art with life, not in its ideal form but in its abstracted forms, contingent to a contemporary society already abstracted. This attention to the gap, I should think, is a central aesthetic procedure here. The formulae of this procedure will be familiar within Ablozhnyy’s lexicon, as the artist has developed it over the past years. Throughout his sculptural and image-based practice, Ablozhnyy repeatedly constructs situations in which different realms—whose gaps, in theform of conditional or functional difference, have been the subject of phenomenologies more or less deconstructed (such as Henri Bergson and Jacques Derrida)—are brought into relation. Ablozhnyy has also called it an interest in what cannot be possessed.

In A Man of Dreams and a Man of Actions (x3) (all works 2026), hollow objects—in this case, two piñatas in the shapes of a star and a sphere, and a textile-covered tube—stage the distinction between contemplation and action. In Duration and Simultaneity, two bi-chromatic elastane bands sourced from the Los Angeles Fashion District are stretched beyond their original dimensions and fixed to wooden panels, whose combined length corresponds to the distance travelled by sound in approximately one hundredth of a second.

Their black and blue colour scheme may reference flags and other visual forms carrying universalism in their belly,

while the format recalls the nuclear-age abstractions of Blinky Palermo, Daniel Buren and, not least, André Cadere. In the sculpture And Say the Animal Responded?, a shard of selenite, the colourless soft crystal, and a cluster of Magic 8 Balls are held in suspension by a band of horsehair, producing a triangular diagram in which the two kinds of late-modern spiritualised totems face each other. Apropos bridging the gap, the readymade—that is, the Magic 8 Ball, telling one’s fate when shaken—casts the question into the room of whether the event of magic can ever exceed the individual détournement and enter the collective.

Newer to the artistic lexicon of approaching the “gap” are the untitled photographic works. On the one hand, the gap-as-loss is their narrative starting point: a harddrive first believed to be empty, but whose contents proved possible to reconstruct after all. The contents comprise a collection of images gathered over more than a decade through analogue cameras, digital cameras and smartphones. Then there is the second operation of difference at the level of composition: each image is placed onto an A2 sheet, pushed into the upper-rightcorner and scaled according to both the degree of artistic labour in Ablozhnyy’s life at the moment the photo was taken, and how much surplus enjoyment was present at that moment. Through this juxtaposition—between these images, having the effect of biography, and the objectivity of the A2 format—the gap becomes an analogy of the personal in relation to society, where biography is scaled onto a social format, and the image of the personal archive is measured against structure.

We met in Frankfurt am Main, where Ablozhnyy studied between 2017 and 2024 in the classes of Judith Hopf and Monika Baer.

As his or my memory has it, I was standing outside shredding paper. Now we meet online. Ablozhnyyis living in Los Angeles, another fantastic motor of illusion. This time I am the paper being shredded to pieces, declining the taming function of writing. “Dem Menschen ist die Wahrheit zumutbar.” The human can be trusted with the truth, Ingeborg Bachmann declared in a laudatory address delivered in 1959 in which she speaks of “that great, secret pain that distinguishes man from all other creatures.” It is a terrible and incomprehensible distinction, she writes. “If it is so that we must bear it and live with it, what form should comfort take, and what use is it to us at all? Then it is—I think—inappropriate to try to create it through words. For whatever form it might take, it would be too small, too cheap, too provisional.”
‍
—Line Ebert

Bogdan Ablozhnyy (b. 1994) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work is the subject of forthcoming solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nuremberg (2026); and Camden Art Centre, London (2027). Recent two-person and group exhibitions include nièce, Nice (with Stuart Sherman, 2026); Layr, Vienna (2025); a.SQUIRE, London (2025); MINK, Frankfurt am Main (2025); Rinde am Rhein, Düsseldorf (2024); Medium P, Berlin (2023); and Capc musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux (2022). Ablozhnyy was the recipient of the 2025 Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Award at Frieze London.