event

Booklaunch Alexey Yurenev - Seeing Against Seeing

Join us on Friday 28 November in Foam’s café for the book presentation of Seeing Against Seeing, the new book by artist and visual researcher Alexey Yurenev, developed with designer Teun van der Heijden. Foam’s curator Claartje van Dijk will talk with Yurenev about the series featured in the publication and the creative process of making this artist book.

Doors wil open at 18.00 hrs and the talk starts around 18.30 hrs.

About the publication & the artist

Seeing Against Seeing places into dialogue two unsettling bodies of imagery: the pages of Ernst Friedrich’s seminal 1924 anti-war book War Against War and a sequence of synthetic images created by Yurenev using a custom-trained GAN. Created to confront the inherited silence of Yurenev’s grandfather, a Red Army soldier who fought from Moscow to Berlin and never spoke of his war experience, the AI images bear a haunting resemblance to Friedrich’s century-old photographs from WWI. Together, these two visual languages collapse into each other across time, exposing war not as a site of glory but as a recurring wound.

This edition also introduces a new dimension: the full transcript of Yurenev’s film No One is Forgotten, in which the last surviving Red Army WWII veterans in Brighton Beach, New York, confront the same AI images reproduced in the book. Their responses, veering between recognition, misremembering, and grief, entwine human memory with machinic vision, transforming the book into a hybrid archive of testimony and invention.

Seeing Against Seeing is part of Yurenev’s ongoing Silent Hero project, which was on display at Foam in 2024 as part of the exhibition Photography Through the Lens of AI.

Seeing Against Seeing © Alexey Yurenev
image of the book 'Seeing Against Seeing'
Seeing Against SeeingAlexey Yurenev
image of the book 'Seeing Against Seeing'
Seeing Against SeeingAlexey Yurenev
image of the book 'Seeing Against Seeing'
Seeing Against SeeingAlexey Yurenev
Image of the book 'Seeing Against Seeing'

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Booklaunch Alexey Yurenev - Seeing Against Seeing