What is your memory for? Bring a friend to Solas for an evening of thinking together, meeting new people, and seeing where one good question takes you.

Alexey Yurenev’s grandfather fought in World War II and rarely spoke about it. When he died, Alexey inherited his medals and set out to understand what his grandfather had lived through. He searched family albums and public archives, then trained an AI model on 35,000 wartime photographs.

He showed the resulting images to five centenarian Red Army veterans in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and explained how they were made. As they looked at the invented scenes, the veterans began to describe what they recognized from their own lives. Their voices became part of Alexey’s artist’s book, Seeing Against Seeing.

Alexey will take us inside that encounter. What can an invented image help us remember? How much of what we remember comes from what we…