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Centre of Visual Culture Béton presents an exhibition of contemporary photography ‘Memento vivere’, which will feature works by Russian and foreign photographers: Joachim Schmeisser, Marcelo Brodsky, Gerard Ransinan, Andrei Chezhin, Sasha Gentsis, art group GrOM, Dmitry Provotorov, Vasily Chunaev. The projects are united in the exposition by the theme of art as an instrument of creation, preserving the memory that the light of creative energy of life is able to dispel the darkness of the inevitability of death. Art as an opportunity to overcome the pessimistic paradigm of memento mori with the optimistic hope of the thesis memento vivere.
Art teaches us to appreciate life in all its manifestations through the richness of human emotion. Where the pragmatism of reason sees catastrophic cataclysm or grey routine, the artist’s vivid imagination can find glimpses of an unexplored future and new horizons of admiration for the universe. In a world where nature is being industrialised, where social upheavals and political conflicts lead to unprecedented outbursts of violence, where machine logic enslaves the lives of billions, art continues to exist to show the proud beauty of the original inhabitants of the wilderness, to demonstrate examples of human heroism in the face of fear and suffering, to visualise the new limitless potential of artificial digital realities. Where the builder sees destruction and decay, art shows the ruins of the great past, where the common man faces the totalitarian life of the present, art visualises the ultimate goal of ideological aspirations for the future and the greatness of bold plans, where the visual document records social inequality, art focuses attention on the strength of spirit and steadfastness of will of the fighters for justice.
Wherever reality invites the viewer to give up, to inactivity and apathy, works of art encourage the viewer to discover new pages of history, to savour every moment and to remember the value of life. Where memento mori warns to fear the all-consuming flames, memento vivere mesmerises the imagination with the magnificent dance of its sacred heat. What to choose in the end – the answer to this question is always left to the viewer.
About the authors of the project:
Joachim Schmeisser.
Photographer, born in 1958 in Germany, started his professional career as an advertising photographer. In addition to commercial photography, he focuses on socially relevant subjects. The photographer is best known for the large-scale photographic series he has done in East Africa since 2009 – the iconic elephant portraits in the Sheldrick Wildlife Sanctuary in Kenya. In 2012 Joachim Schmeisser received the prestigious Hasselblad Masters Award for this project and his work is still exhibited worldwide to this day. In 2017 his book ‘Elephants in Paradise’ was released by German publisher teNeues and sold out within 4 months. The next book ‘The Last of Their Kind’ was published in spring 2021 by teNeues publishing house. Joachim Schmeisser is one of the most prominent photographers of this genre in the world. His books on Africa’s endangered wildlife, Elephants in the Sky and The Last of Their Kind, have become bestsellers.
Marcelo Brodsky.
A photographer and human rights activist, he was born in 1954 in Argentina but was forced to emigrate to Barcelona as a result of the 1976 military coup. There he studied economics at the University of Barcelona and photography at the International Centre of Photography. His teacher was the Catalan photographer Manel Esclusa. Marcelo returned to Argentina in 1984 and continued his work. His projects, such as ‘Buena Memoria’, have been exhibited more than 250 times around the world as part of exhibition projects or as peronal projects, such as at Nexo, the Recoleta Cultural Centre, the Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum in Chile and other venues. In addition, the project ‘Correspondencias Visuales’, consisting of visual dialogues with other artists such as Martin Parr, Manel Escluza or Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, was exhibited at the Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Mexico, as well as at the Museum of Memory and Human Sacrifice in Santiago de Chile.
In 2008, Marcelo received the Human Rights Award from Bnai Brith Argentina. In 2014, he received the Jean Mayer Award from the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University. Brodsky’s works are in many major museum collections, such as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, London’s Tate Gallery, New York’s Metropolitan, Germany, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and many other public and private collections.
Gérard Rancinan.
Photographer, artist, journalist, born in 1953 in France. He began his career as an apprentice in the laboratory of the photo department of the daily newspaper Bordeaux, Sud Ouest. At the age of 18, he became the youngest photojournalist in France to cover the news of the region. In 1973 he was noticed by the newly founded Sygma press agency and Rancinan became Sygma’s staff photographer in Paris. In 1989, Gérard became an independent photographer. His portraits of leading personalities (Fidel Castro, Pope John Paul II, François Mitterrand, Monica Bellucci, Tiger Woods, Yasser Arafat, Bill Gates, etc.) and his photographic ‘sagas’ describing major social events were published on the front pages of Paris Match, Life Magazine, Stern, and the Sunday Times Magazine.
Rancinan photographs his contemporaries and analyses the behaviours and beliefs characteristic of contemporary society. Ransinan’s photographs are studied in French schools as part of the National Diploma (DNB) in Art History. The master’s works are held in public and private collections around the world.
Gonçalo Mabunda.
The artist and sculptor was born in 1975 in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. Mabunda learnt his initial skills of working with metal in the workshop of the artist Andreas Bova. The main material used by the artist is deactivated modern weapons and their fragments – Kalashnikov assault rifles, shell casings, infantry mines left after the civil war, which was fought for 16 years in his native land. One of the incentives for the sculptor to work with this material was a project launched in 1997 by the Mozambican government to transform war spoils into peaceful tools and works of art. According to Blouin Modern Painters magazine, Gonçalo Mabundabyl was recognised as one of the ten best African artists in 2019. He was also a prize winner of the Venice Biennale ‘All the World’s Futures’ in 2015. The artist’s works are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, TirocheDe Leon, the Bill Clinton Collection, the Vatican Museum, and the Béton Centre. Gonzalo Mabunda’s works have been presented at institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Museum of Art Düsseldorf, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, and the European Parliament.
Vasily Chunaev.
Photographer, born in 1993, lives and works in St Petersburg. Graduated from the Pacific State University. Since 2022 he has been engaged in photography, constantly improving his professional skills in analogue and alternative printing methods. The photographer presents a series of works from the cycle ‘Soviet Constructivism’, refers to the traditions of classical European and Russian schools of photography.
Art group GrOM.
An association of photographer Olga Michi, historian of photography Alexey Loginov and art historian Artem Loginov. The creative collective was formed in 2020. In 2021 it 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 works of the Art Group GrOM are in the collection of the State Russian Museum, as well as private collections.
Sasha Gentsis.
Born in Moscow in 1971, author working in the technique of modern digital photography. Lives and works in Moscow.
Since 2014 he has been mastering new expressive possibilities of modern digital technologies of photography and image processing. The style of ‘Abandoned’, or photography of abandoned and industrial objects, has become dominant in Gentsis’s work, which prompted the artist to carry out a unique shooting on the territory of the legendary Moscow factory ‘ZIL’ shortly before its demolition. For 4 years he photographed all the workshops still in operation or already abandoned. The result of his work was the project ‘Socialist Surrealism’.
Since 2020 Sasha Genzis has been working on the project ‘Managed Heavens’, 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 by means of contemporary photographic art. The works are in the collections of the Russian Museum, the Beton Centre for Visual Culture and private collections.
Dmitry Provotorov.
Photographer, born in 1975 in Leningrad. He became interested in photography in 1998. In 1999 he studied at the film school ‘Kadr’ at the ‘Lenfilm’ film studio, in the same year he got acquainted with the St. Petersburg photographer Sergey Sveshnikov, with whose support he learnt the techniques of manual black-and-white printing. From 1999 to 2000 he studied at the cameraman’s department of the St. Petersburg Institute of Film Engineers. Since 2000 he started to work actively in the field of black-and-white photography, experimenting with hand-printing and virginisation. Since 2006 his works have been shown at international art exhibitions in Italy, USA, Spain, Russia. Member of the Union of Artists of Russia since 2017.
Andrey Chezhin.
Master of contemporary Russian photography, artist.
Born in Leningrad in 1960. Graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Film Engineers (1982). At the same time he began to take photographs. Member of the Zerkalo photo club (1985). Member of the group ‘TAK’ (1987-1996). Member of the artistic association ‘Photopostscriptum’ (1993). Member of the Union of Photo Artists of Russia (1995). Member of the ‘Free Culture’ Association (1996). Since 1998 member of the International Federation of Artists (IFA). Organiser and board member of the annual festival ‘Autumn Photo Marathon’ (1999-2005). Director of the gallery ‘PHOTOimage’ and personal museum of contemporary art ‘Museum of Stationery Button’. Currently works as a freelance photographer. Author of 90 solo exhibitions and participant in 180 group exhibitions in Russia and abroad. . The works are kept in Russian and foreign state and private collections: State Hermitage Museum; Russian Museum; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; Beton Centre for Visual Culture; ROSPHOTO, St. Petersburg; The Navigator Fondation, Boston, USA; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, USA; Southeast Museum of Photography, Florida, USA; The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers; Frederick R. Rutgers. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas, USA; The Brooklyn Museum, NewYork, USA; Muzeo d’Arte Contemporanea di Milano; The Hechinger Collection, USA; Collection the Royal Bank of Scotland in Houston; The Brandts Musseet for Fotokunst in Odense, Denmark.
Centre of Visual Culture Béton presents an exhibition of contemporary photography ‘Memento vivere’, which will feature works by Russian and foreign photographers: Joachim Schmeisser, Marcelo Brodsky, Gerard Ransinan, Andrei Chezhin, Sasha Gentsis, art group GrOM, Dmitry Provotorov, Vasily Chunaev. The projects are united in the exposition by the theme of art as an instrument of creation, preserving the memory that the light of creative energy of life is able to dispel the darkness of the inevitability of death. Art as an opportunity to overcome the pessimistic paradigm of memento mori with the optimistic hope of the thesis memento vivere.
Art teaches us to appreciate life in all its manifestations through the richness of human emotion. Where the pragmatism of reason sees catastrophic cataclysm or grey routine, the artist’s vivid imagination can find glimpses of an unexplored future and new horizons of admiration for the universe. In a world where nature is being industrialised, where social upheavals and political conflicts lead to unprecedented outbursts of violence, where machine logic enslaves the lives of billions, art continues to exist to show the proud beauty of the original inhabitants of the wilderness, to demonstrate examples of human heroism in the face of fear and suffering, to visualise the new limitless potential of artificial digital realities. Where the builder sees destruction and decay, art shows the ruins of the great past, where the common man faces the totalitarian life of the present, art visualises the ultimate goal of ideological aspirations for the future and the greatness of bold plans, where the visual document records social inequality, art focuses attention on the strength of spirit and steadfastness of will of the fighters for justice.
Wherever reality invites the viewer to give up, to inactivity and apathy, works of art encourage the viewer to discover new pages of history, to savour every moment and to remember the value of life. Where memento mori warns to fear the all-consuming flames, memento vivere mesmerises the imagination with the magnificent dance of its sacred heat. What to choose in the end – the answer to this question is always left to the viewer.
About the authors of the project:
Joachim Schmeisser.
Photographer, born in 1958 in Germany, started his professional career as an advertising photographer. In addition to commercial photography, he focuses on socially relevant subjects. The photographer is best known for the large-scale photographic series he has done in East Africa since 2009 – the iconic elephant portraits in the Sheldrick Wildlife Sanctuary in Kenya. In 2012 Joachim Schmeisser received the prestigious Hasselblad Masters Award for this project and his work is still exhibited worldwide to this day. In 2017 his book ‘Elephants in Paradise’ was released by German publisher teNeues and sold out within 4 months. The next book ‘The Last of Their Kind’ was published in spring 2021 by teNeues publishing house. Joachim Schmeisser is one of the most prominent photographers of this genre in the world. His books on Africa’s endangered wildlife, Elephants in the Sky and The Last of Their Kind, have become bestsellers.
Marcelo Brodsky.
A photographer and human rights activist, he was born in 1954 in Argentina but was forced to emigrate to Barcelona as a result of the 1976 military coup. There he studied economics at the University of Barcelona and photography at the International Centre of Photography. His teacher was the Catalan photographer Manel Esclusa. Marcelo returned to Argentina in 1984 and continued his work. His projects, such as ‘Buena Memoria’, have been exhibited more than 250 times around the world as part of exhibition projects or as peronal projects, such as at Nexo, the Recoleta Cultural Centre, the Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum in Chile and other venues. In addition, the project ‘Correspondencias Visuales’, consisting of visual dialogues with other artists such as Martin Parr, Manel Escluza or Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, was exhibited at the Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Mexico, as well as at the Museum of Memory and Human Sacrifice in Santiago de Chile.
In 2008, Marcelo received the Human Rights Award from Bnai Brith Argentina. In 2014, he received the Jean Mayer Award from the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University. Brodsky’s works are in many major museum collections, such as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, London’s Tate Gallery, New York’s Metropolitan, Germany, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and many other public and private collections.
Gérard Rancinan.
Photographer, artist, journalist, born in 1953 in France. He began his career as an apprentice in the laboratory of the photo department of the daily newspaper Bordeaux, Sud Ouest. At the age of 18, he became the youngest photojournalist in France to cover the news of the region. In 1973 he was noticed by the newly founded Sygma press agency and Rancinan became Sygma’s staff photographer in Paris. In 1989, Gérard became an independent photographer. His portraits of leading personalities (Fidel Castro, Pope John Paul II, François Mitterrand, Monica Bellucci, Tiger Woods, Yasser Arafat, Bill Gates, etc.) and his photographic ‘sagas’ describing major social events were published on the front pages of Paris Match, Life Magazine, Stern, and the Sunday Times Magazine.
Rancinan photographs his contemporaries and analyses the behaviours and beliefs characteristic of contemporary society. Ransinan’s photographs are studied in French schools as part of the National Diploma (DNB) in Art History. The master’s works are held in public and private collections around the world.
Gonçalo Mabunda.
The artist and sculptor was born in 1975 in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. Mabunda learnt his initial skills of working with metal in the workshop of the artist Andreas Bova. The main material used by the artist is deactivated modern weapons and their fragments – Kalashnikov assault rifles, shell casings, infantry mines left after the civil war, which was fought for 16 years in his native land. One of the incentives for the sculptor to work with this material was a project launched in 1997 by the Mozambican government to transform war spoils into peaceful tools and works of art. According to Blouin Modern Painters magazine, Gonçalo Mabundabyl was recognised as one of the ten best African artists in 2019. He was also a prize winner of the Venice Biennale ‘All the World’s Futures’ in 2015. The artist’s works are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, TirocheDe Leon, the Bill Clinton Collection, the Vatican Museum, and the Béton Centre. Gonzalo Mabunda’s works have been presented at institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Museum of Art Düsseldorf, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, and the European Parliament.
Vasily Chunaev.
Photographer, born in 1993, lives and works in St Petersburg. Graduated from the Pacific State University. Since 2022 he has been engaged in photography, constantly improving his professional skills in analogue and alternative printing methods. The photographer presents a series of works from the cycle ‘Soviet Constructivism’, refers to the traditions of classical European and Russian schools of photography.
Art group GrOM.
An association of photographer Olga Michi, historian of photography Alexey Loginov and art historian Artem Loginov. The creative collective was formed in 2020. In 2021 it 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 works of the Art Group GrOM are in the collection of the State Russian Museum, as well as private collections.
Sasha Gentsis.
Born in Moscow in 1971, author working in the technique of modern digital photography. Lives and works in Moscow.
Since 2014 he has been mastering new expressive possibilities of modern digital technologies of photography and image processing. The style of ‘Abandoned’, or photography of abandoned and industrial objects, has become dominant in Gentsis’s work, which prompted the artist to carry out a unique shooting on the territory of the legendary Moscow factory ‘ZIL’ shortly before its demolition. For 4 years he photographed all the workshops still in operation or already abandoned. The result of his work was the project ‘Socialist Surrealism’.
Since 2020 Sasha Genzis has been working on the project ‘Managed Heavens’, 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 by means of contemporary photographic art. The works are in the collections of the Russian Museum, the Beton Centre for Visual Culture and private collections.
Dmitry Provotorov.
Photographer, born in 1975 in Leningrad. He became interested in photography in 1998. In 1999 he studied at the film school ‘Kadr’ at the ‘Lenfilm’ film studio, in the same year he got acquainted with the St. Petersburg photographer Sergey Sveshnikov, with whose support he learnt the techniques of manual black-and-white printing. From 1999 to 2000 he studied at the cameraman’s department of the St. Petersburg Institute of Film Engineers. Since 2000 he started to work actively in the field of black-and-white photography, experimenting with hand-printing and virginisation. Since 2006 his works have been shown at international art exhibitions in Italy, USA, Spain, Russia. Member of the Union of Artists of Russia since 2017.
Andrey Chezhin.
Master of contemporary Russian photography, artist.
Born in Leningrad in 1960. Graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Film Engineers (1982). At the same time he began to take photographs. Member of the Zerkalo photo club (1985). Member of the group ‘TAK’ (1987-1996). Member of the artistic association ‘Photopostscriptum’ (1993). Member of the Union of Photo Artists of Russia (1995). Member of the ‘Free Culture’ Association (1996). Since 1998 member of the International Federation of Artists (IFA). Organiser and board member of the annual festival ‘Autumn Photo Marathon’ (1999-2005). Director of the gallery ‘PHOTOimage’ and personal museum of contemporary art ‘Museum of Stationery Button’. Currently works as a freelance photographer. Author of 90 solo exhibitions and participant in 180 group exhibitions in Russia and abroad. . The works are kept in Russian and foreign state and private collections: State Hermitage Museum; Russian Museum; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; Beton Centre for Visual Culture; ROSPHOTO, St. Petersburg; The Navigator Fondation, Boston, USA; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, USA; Southeast Museum of Photography, Florida, USA; The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers; Frederick R. Rutgers. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas, USA; The Brooklyn Museum, NewYork, USA; Muzeo d’Arte Contemporanea di Milano; The Hechinger Collection, USA; Collection the Royal Bank of Scotland in Houston; The Brandts Musseet for Fotokunst in Odense, Denmark.
