The Centre of Visual Culture Béton (Moscow) and the Gallery of Contemporary Art of the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan present an exhibition combining the projects of two photographers: Sasha Gentsis (‘Flight to Dream’) and Almond Chu (‘Parade/In the Future’). The exhibition will also feature works by the art group GrOM – ‘The Last Day of Helios’, ‘Exile from Paradise’, ‘Midas’.
‘Flight to Dream’ by Sasha Gentsis is primarily an artistic project, in which the author wants to express his impression of the beauty of aircraft cabins; to show that industrial objects can have not only historical value, but also aesthetic value. For this purpose, the photographer makes detailed images, changes colours, mounts landscapes outside the window of the aircraft. To express his emotions to the fullest extent, Genzis uses all the latest achievements of computer technology, as well as AI.
The exhibition includes photographic canvases (125x167sm), which allow you to see the cockpits of historical aeroplanes, which are inaccessible to the viewer, as well as to feel yourself at the wheel. The works, executed in large format with high image detail, allow you to go far beyond the simple copying of reality.
Sasha Gentsis (Moscow, 1971) is an author working in the technique of modern digital photography. He lives and works in Moscow.

Since 2014 he has been exploring the new expressive possibilities of modern digital photography and image processing technologies. The style of ‘Abandoned’, or photography of abandoned and industrial objects, has become dominant in Gencis’ work, which prompted the artist to take a unique photograph in the territory of the legendary Moscow factory “ZIL” shortly before its demolition. For 4 years he photographed all the still operating or already abandoned workshops. The result of his work was the project ‘Socialist Surrealism’.
Since 2020 Sasha Genzis has been working on the project ‘Managed Skies’, which in an expanded format has grown into the series ‘Flight to Dream’.
At the moment, the photographer continues to explore the peculiarities of the relationship between man and nature through the means of contemporary photographic art.
Almond Chu, a photographer originally from Hong Kong, has participated in more than 230 exhibition projects worldwide and has held 24 solo exhibitions. His works are represented in the collections of internationally renowned museum collections, including the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, the Collection Uhoda, the Béton Central Exhibition Centre and others. The exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art will feature works from two of the artist’s projects – Parade and In The Future.

遊行 – ‘Parade’ (Parade).
In our national photography, parade is often associated with parades in Red Square, where people are organised, moving in a certain order. In this case parades are a symbol of unity of people, a symbol of statement of some common goal and task. Almond Chu makes parades for a different purpose – he wants to show us the danger when people who are seriously organised, crammed into a certain order can lose their individuality, their identity. All the people who are depicted in his works are the artist himself, where he replicates himself, thus showing the depersonalisation of modern man in today’s high-tech society.
在未來 – In The Future is inspired by major cataclysms, particularly COVID-19. The series focuses on the fact that even if a civilisation dies from some serious cataclysm, it will still be reborn. The symbol of rebirth, the symbol of a new civilisation in Almond Chu is a woman.
The project is made in platinotype technology, thus the author tells us that the new civilisation is born through old technologies, such as platinotype. But further still these grey prints, i.e. ‘grey life’ will be bloomed with colours, that is why in Chu’s works various elements appear in the form of hand-colouring, inclusions of elements from gold and silver. The transition from one state to another is symbolised here by coloured objects reminiscent of the stele from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. So despite its initial tragic nature, the project is very optimistic.

Almond Chu (1962, Hong Kong) is a Chinese photographer and artist known for his conceptual series of large format works created using digital technology. In his youth he moved to Tokyo to study at the Tokyo College of Photography. He then returned to his hometown where he opened his own studio in 1993. In the same year, Almond Chu was awarded the Asian Culture Council’s Young Photographer Award, after which he trained in New York. In 2007 Almond Chu founded the art photography magazine pHi and became its editor-in-chief. He is a regular contributor to major international conferences on contemporary art.

Art group GrOM is an association of photographer Olga Michi, historian of photography Alexey Viktorovich Loginov and art historian Artem Loginov. The creative team was formed in 2020. In 2021 presented its first joint art project ‘Dwelling of the Future’. Each work is a modern digital easel painting with a plot and abstract rhythms. In its work, the GrOM group develops the ideas of the masters of the Düsseldorf school of photography. The group’s projects are based on photographic images that go through many stages of creative and technical processing to become finished works that form thematic series. In the project, the visual appeal of the works is accompanied by the depth of the philosophical phenomena being explored. The project ‘Dwelling of the Future’, presented in Kazan at the end of 2022, was successfully held at the GCA SMFA RT, while Olga Michi’s personal projects ‘The Vulnerable’ and ‘The Face of Deity’ received special praise from Kazan viewers in the spring of the same year.
In the exposition, the GrOM group will present the works ‘The Last Day of Helios’, ‘Exile from Paradise’ and ‘Midas’. Taking as a basis well-known works of painting and literature, myths, parables and tales, the artists put them into the language of modern art, thus rethinking them from the point of view of problems and phenomena of modern society. Using well-known compositions, they fill them with modern symbols and populate them with modern characters, which are modelled using AI.

Gallery of Modern Art of the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan
Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan, 57, Karl Marx str.