The "Shishim Petroglyphs" exhibition is the result of Andrei Balandin's three-week stay at the "Shishim Hill" artist residence. The artist started thinking about the project together with his co-author on book projects Andreas Aug from Germany.

In early October, Andreas Aug, an artist, poet and architect from Germany, visited the area of the Shishim Hill, held several public talks, and in his open lecture called "Transformation", he talked about how he works with the facades of residential buildings. By shifting the focus from the functional view of an architect to the artistic view which is devoid of pragmatism, he creates vivid patterns from the facades of residential areas.

Andrei Balandin used similar logic. During a master class on making stickers and incorporating them into the urban environment, a character called Shishim was born. Shishim is a fictional forefather, one of the inhabitants of the Shishim Hill ten thousand years ago. Andrei Balandin was looking at the area during his artistic walks through the prism of Shishim.

It wasn't just graphic elements – petroglyphs left by representatives of unknown civilizations – that were found under the magnifying lens of the character of this new legend. Through the drawings of our alleged ancestors, this civilization itself emerges without tearing the earth's crust with its tectonic will, but seeping with piercing sounds through the numerous cracks of the universe, appearing with ever clearer contours on the surface of our world. So, having appeared, these characters restore their world in all its active fullness.

Sound by Evgeny Kormiltsev
Curated by Zhenya Chaika