Silent Hero: Seeing Against Seeing exhibition at the Rotterdam Photo Festival from March 25 until March 29 2026. I will be giving an artist talk on Friday March 27 at 16:45 CET.

Installation Design: Kirill Ass and Nadia Korbut

Thirty six page Portfolio and essay, Silent Hero, published in Virginia Quarterly Review (Fall 2025)

Read it online here or buy the printed issue.

Seeing Against Seeing selected in lensculture's favorite photobooks list.

Monday Nov 17th, 12h30, I will be giving a guest lunch lecture that will take place at @photographyandsociety (MAPS) Studio, room CD.001 at KABK. Alexey Yurenev is an artist, visual researcher, and educator whose work explores the intersections of memory, technology, and production of knowledge. By enlisting various mediums such as photography, video, archives, and machine learning he seeks to create multi-vocal methodologies that penetrate traditional narratives of stable cultural histories. In his work, Alexey examines how technology and storytelling intertwine to shape our understanding of the past, future and present. He is fascinated by the dislocation of identity and how these shifts affect our collective social memory. Working with a wide range of mediums, he explores the intersection of technology and the mediation of memory. Alexey is Adjunct Faculty in the visual arts MFA Program at Columbia University and a faculty member at the International Center of Photography (ICP). His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including FOAM (Amsterdam), Hangar (Brussels), MOMus Modern/Costakis Collection (Thessaloniki), and Rencontres d’Arles. He is the author of the book Seeing Against Seeing (2025).

Seeing Against Seeing installation on display at MOMus Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki, GR as part of the exhibition Ecumenical War from June 12 until October 25

The timeless condemnation of war and the power that art has to always express the unspeakable in a revealing way and at the same time to give hope and function as a field of creation and survival in the darkest periods, are just some of the semiotic bases of the exhibition "Universal War. The artistic Avant-garde on the World War I front. Works from the Costakis collection" which is presented from 15 June to 25 October 2025 at MOMus-Museum of Modern Art, at the Moni Lazariston, in Thessaloniki. 

On the occasion of the 111th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, the exhibition covers the period from 1914 to 1918 and explores how Avant-garde artists in Russia, responded to the greatest war in human history and its escalating outcomes until 1920.

The “Great War” was largely perceived as the final act of the Old World. World War I in the Russian Empire, as in the rest of the world, abruptly disrupted the flow of history and caused a rupture in artistic consciousness, especially in the philosophy of the avant-gardists of all forms of art. At the same time, while there were critical concerns and fear over the devastating consequences for life and the economy, artists of that time were seized by a revolutionary mentality that did not fear breaking with the past. Great samples of this artistic renaissance were artistic movements such as Cubo-Futurism, Suprematism, the early Constructivism of Tatlin, and its influence on the Dadaists were born; irrational poetic writing and atonal music also developed.

From the satirical images of 1914 to the transrational writing of Aleksei Kruchenykh and the non-objective art of Kazimir Malevich, Liubov Popova, Ivan Kliun, and others, and from the mystical writings of Velimir Khlebnikov and Pavel Filonov, aimed at exorcising war, to the tragic figures of amputee soldiers portrayed by Solomon Nikritin, the exhibition emphasizes the apocalyptic nature of the War and conveys strong anti-militarist messages.

As an epilogue to the exhibition, the work “Seeing Against Seeing” by the photographer and researcher Alexey Yurenev is presented. It is the result of a dialogue between Ernst Friedrich’s 1924 anti-war manifesto “War Against War!” —in which he compiled graphic photographs of World War I’s aftermath to expose its brutality—along with thousands of portraits from World War II era. AI trained to be fault evoke timeless portraits of war violence and evidence of the psychological terror it causes. Installation design: Kirill Ass and Nadia Korbut

Silent Hero feature in Yogurt Magazine.