Seeing Against Seeing by Alexey Yurenev

Cambridge, Mass. – Temporary Institute for Unification of Knowledge presents Seeing Against Seeing, an installation by Alexey Yurenev centered around an artist’s book and a two-channel presentation of the film, “No One is Forgotten.”

Created in collaboration with designer Teun van der Heijden and the Anti-Kriegs-Museum in Berlin, the work is one of several outcomes of “Silent Hero,” an ongoing visual research project investigating Yurenev’s grandfather’s unspoken experience during the Second World War. This is the project’s Cambridge premiere.

Rooted in the documentary tradition, the project confronts the challenge of visualizing what cannot be seen: absences in family and state archives, repressed memories, and events without witnesses. If photojournalism shows what could not be observed firsthand, one of generative AI’s more provocative capacities is to imagine what never happened, but could have. It is this speculative potential that draws Yurenev into collaboration with artificial intelligence.

At the center of the work is a dialogue with Ernst Friedrich’s 1924 anti-war manifesto, “War Against War!”, a publication that used graphic photography to dismantle the heroic image of conflict. Yurenev responds by employing a bespoke generative model trained exclusively on 35,000 WWII-era portraits and landscapes. The resulting synthetic images bear a striking resemblance to Friedrich’s collected photographs; they resemble historical photographs while destabilizing the certainty of photographic evidence itself. Rather than reconstructing the past, the images expose the instability of memory, realism, and technological vision.

Yurenev printed the generated images using a photopolymer photogravure technique before presenting them to five centenarian Red Army veterans in Brighton Beach, New York. These veterans, members of the same generation as Yurenev’s grandfather, encounter the synthetic images through a process of image elicitation, where the AI-generated scenes function as prompts to recall, reconstruct and renegotiate their wartime memories and personal narratives. Their reactions, recollections and interpretations were recorded and later incorporated into the film, “No One is Forgotten.”

The hand-bound artist’s book incorporates fragments of “War Against War!”, translucent pages printed in silver ink, polymer prints, and testimonies from veterans. Housed inside a welded iron case designed to rust over time, the object carries the physical weight of the histories it engages.

Together, the installation, book, and film form a meditation on vision itself: how we see, what remains unseen, and how seeing might be turned against itself.

Event Program:
May 15 6:00 PM Exhibition Opening + Artist Talk
June 5 7:00 PM Roundtable with Andreas Mershin

The exhibition is open to public on selected days by appointment. Please reach out to [email protected] to arrange a visit.
The event is free with a suggested donation. All proceeds go to the Temporary Institute for Unification of Knowledge.

About the Artist:

Alexey Yurenev is an artist and visual researcher whose work explores the intersections of technology, memory, and the production of knowledge. He teaches at Columbia University and the International Center of Photography. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including FOAM, Palazzo Poggi, MOMus Modern/Costakis Collection and Rencontres d’Arles. Yurenev has been recognized by Photographer of the Year International, received the Silurian Society Award for excellence in arts and culture journalism, and was nominated for an Emmy Award. He is the author of “Seeing Against Seeing” (Nooscope, 2025).

About the Presenters:

Temporary Institute for Unification of Knowledge (TEMPI) is a collaborative of artists-scientists founded in 2025 in Cambridge, Mass., by artist-scientist Joe Davis. The institute’s mission is to offer a journey for the open mind by promoting deep interactions across a Vitruvian array of disciplines, embracing art, science, mathematics, and engineering. TEMPI’s core values include facilitating a community of visionary research fellows; incubating art/science collaborations; and producing, documenting, and disseminating groundbreaking developments across the arts and sciences.

Andreas Mershin is a physicist, inventor, and entrepreneur whose work spans biophysics, artificial intelligence, machine olfaction, and sensory technologies. Formerly the director of the MIT Label Free Research Group at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, he is currently the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of RealNose.ai, a company developing AI-driven olfactory sensing systems for medical diagnostics inspired by biological intelligence. Mershin also teaches at MIT Sloan and is the president of OsmoCosm.org, a nonprofit focused on advancing machine olfaction technologies.

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