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.

Kazdal's work begins not with image, but with its undoing-beyond narrative, beyond the subject. She works without a camera. Without capture. She does not build toward legibility—she subtracts, erodes, obliterates. This is a form of affective sabotage: an image-world not organised by the camera’s gaze, but scattered by it. Think, for example, of Annabel Nicolson’s Reel Time (1973), where the projector and sewing machine are forced into collision, producing a loop that ends in disintegration. Nicolson’s act—threading domestic labour through the machinery of cinema—tears at the gendered infrastructure of vision itself. In Kazdal’s hands, damage becomes a method of release: of forces unbound from narrative, where the image doesn’t end but leaks, flickers, trembles, or disappears.

On display are works unconcerned with sustaining the rhythm of cinema as it is packaged and received, but rather, works attuned to the energetics of images, sounds, and, especially, objects that gesture toward the unpresentable. And the objects she draws into her field are never left untouched: they stretch, bend, multiply. They dance, shout, frighten—then spin violently on their axes, flicker, and vanish, as if none of it ever happened. Or as if nothing was found, only ever embedded in us—and then not. Let us say that Kazdal's ‘work’ bleeds into a filmic plane where affective charges move across objects and moments in discontinuous bursts —in a word: not simply malfunctions, but energetic torsions-moments where the image ceases to represent or form a whole; it only withholds, obstructs, smears and leaks. As if the only true gesture left to the image is to tear itself apart before it can be possessed.

Kazdal moves through the raw, unstructured affective flows that precede—and exceed—the system of the camera. It is here, somewhere between form and matter, in a space that resists settling into representational categories, that her work draws its force: not from what film shows, but from what film is, or could become—filmic matter and objects charged with potential. Fernand Léger then becomes an obvious reference for her. For Léger, every effort in the realm of spectacle—or the moving image—should work to bring out the object. Engaging in a free-play (‘Violence is the first rule of the game of encounters’) with the types of objects Léger lists in his essay—a pipe, a chair, a hand, an eye, a typewriter, a hat, a foot, for instance—Kazdal peels them from familiarity, allowing them to become insurgent. They twitch, they seethe, they refuse to serve. Kazdal lets them speak in tongues—not to say something, but to unmake what has already been said. The logic of the object is unbound. “A whole new world of cinematographic methods”—Kazdal walks that threshold, then redraws it in her own image.