Silent Hero
Silent Hero is a long-term visual research project that begins with a family silence. Alexey Yurenev’s grandfather fought in the Red Army during the Second World War, returned home with medals, and never spoke about what he had witnessed. That absence is not approached as a gap to be filled, but as a condition that shapes how history is carried, transmitted, and withheld across generations.
The project unfolds through many overlapping methods: working with family and state archives, revisiting landscapes where violence has left little visible trace, engaging in conversations that circle memory rather than extract it, and using imaging systems that complicate the authority of photographic realism. These approaches come together most densely in the artist book Seeing Against Seeing, where images, texts, and structures operate through proximity rather than explanation.
While grounded in a specific family history, Silent Hero remains in conversation with other conflicts and their afterlives. By placing personal memory alongside broader histories of war, displacement, and repression, the project considers how different conflicts echo one another through shared visual languages, silences, and modes of representation. History appears not as a stable record, but as something fragmented, mediated, and continually reshaped by the tools used to approach it.
Find out more:
Website: yurenev.com
Instagram: @yurenev