ela kazdal

Ela is an artist and filmmaker based in London and a video editor at MUBI. She has presented her films at Salt and Beyoğlu Cinema in Istanbul (TR), Æden and Wolf Kino in Berlin (DE), Everyman Cinema, Firstsite, Fabrica, Royal College of Art (UK) The Film-maker’s Cooperative in New York (US) and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL).  

















about
email

camera shy
Ela Kazdal
24.05 - 22.06.2025

Fringe Gallery
Sepänkyläntie 2
65100 Vaasa, Finland

@fringe.gallery
www.fringe.gallery/

Director
Britt Al-Bussan

Curator
Julian Ross

Words by Thomas King

Fringe Gallery presents Ela Kazdal’s first solo exhibition at the gallery from 24 May - 22 June. Working without a camera, Kazdal unsettles the frame and rejects its function as a boundary between inner and outer spaces. Across the works on display, film asserts its tactile, three-dimensional presence - fractured traces of the visual emerge as the filmstrip and other objects undergo reworking, obscuring and decay.

What would it mean to empty authority of form, of content, to open the so-called body, to spread out its surfaces? Can we locate the raw, unstructured affective flows that precede-and exceed-the system of the camera and reach a very desperate conflict?

If, for Lyotard, intensities cross the surface without telos or morality, then in Kazdal’s blackened materialism, the filmic image only leaves a residue. This isn’t a corner suited to a politics of exposure, but one attuned to disappearance. If the subject [or Suppôt] has traditionally acted in philosophy as the central node for organising knowledge, eliminating difference and disorder, and if man once did not exist, then did, then did not again, then the destituent impulse becomes a refusal of the camera-subject as organising principle or guiding force. It is, instead, about pulsation.

Let us follow James Leo Cahill's reflections on Tscherkassky – where breakdowns in form become the very engine of critical dislocation, displacing the film frame as the foundational unit of the medium's economy. To borrow the phrasing of Tscherkassky himself - to conjure up a "paradise of malfunctions" that linger in the medium like spectral interruptions, moments where the filmic body does not simply move through its frames but rather rips them apart, reconfigures them, forces them into disarray. Here, the filmic operates not through a closure of meaning or a neat narrative structure but through a heightened sensitivity to the event, the moment that breaks free from the continuity of form, calling attention to the visual and auditory outcrops that resurface from the depths of the field. For Kazdal this is to engage in a free play ("Violence is the first rule of the game of encounters”) with objects – a pipe, a chair, a hand, an eye, a typewriter, a hat, a foot.

The (camera) shy are open to the energetics of images, sounds, and, especially, objects. The shy’s gestures are what ONE desperately tries to represent. And the tools the shy draw into their field are never left untouched: they stretch, bend, multiply. Then, the shy awkwardly, but nonetheless, dance, shout, frighten-and spin violently on their invisible axes, flicker, and vanish, as if none of it ever happened. The shy are prone to vanishing. As if nothing was found, embedded in us and then not. Perhaps that’s the point: not to seek confidence in a new subject or world, but to shy away from this subject-world that we inhabit, inhabits us. Certainly, we speak less of the stars or any heavenly sphere, only the impulses in our weak hands.


List of Work




‘excess’
cut out paper, 16mm film strip, tape.
7 x 10 cm




‘non-reflex ghost’
16mm film strips, nails.
17 x 47 cm




‘projections’
16mm and 35mm film, hooks, spools.




‘blow-up’
Lightbox, 35mm film, 16mm Non-Reflex Bolex camera, scissor, spools, tape.
45 x 150 cm




‘if you seek amy’
iPhone, pipe rail, headphones, 16mm and 35mm film transferred to video
2 minutes on loop.




‘thread, chain, beads and tacks’
Monitors, 16mm and 35mm film transferred to video
2 minutes on loop.


‘viscera’
35mm slides, excerpts from Ester Freider’s essay “Viscera: 
On the intimate technics of film with Ela Kazdal”


Gallery Shop

‘thread, chain, beads and tacks’ flipbook, edition of 5
6.5 x 12.5 x 2.5 cm

‘Agfa Moviechrome Red,’ edition of 6
21 x 29 cm
sliding scale