🗓️March 30 – April 3, 2016
YOUTH CENTER OF THE STATE HERMITAGE MUSEUM
📍45 Moyka River Embankment, 3rd fl, St. Petersburg 191186 Russia
◆“Wish You Were Here” Exhibition of Alexander Terebenin and Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai◆
The exhibition “Wish You Were Here” was a collaborative project by two prominent contemporary Russian artists, Alexander Terebenin and Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai. It combined installation, photography, and theatrical elements to explore themes of presence, absence, and imagined travel. The artists created a space where personal memories and collective history intertwined, inviting viewers to reflect on the fragility of human experience, the passing of time, and the surreal ways we try to preserve memory.
Chaos is merely an illusion. Everything is programmed in advance. The exhausted heroes of online battles—the couch knights of the 21st century—know this all too well. It is no coincidence that the products of gaming corporations simulating “another life” have become so relevant to today’s art scene. The game space is clearly defined. Its prototype: the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Using documentary video and photographic materials, the developers rely on realistic graphics, mysterious locations, and the deep atmosphere of post-apocalypse.
Artist Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai gives form to the impossible. His project “Morning in Chernobyl / Radioactive Versailles” is not merely an image of an abandoned place—it is an artificial paradise. The game is multi-level and full of characters, reminiscent of Bosch: numerous plywood figures as participants, spectators, and accidental witnesses. Troubling dreams with fast-paced plots. The illness progresses: there is no longer a boundary between reality and fiction.
The second artist in the project, Alexander Terebenin, reveals parallel worlds without delving into a masterfully simulated digital realm. Year after year, he documents the silent void that exists beside us. The roof has collapsed, the ceilings have rotted, and mold eats away at the walls. Paint peels off like scrolls of ancient manuscripts. Dust, decay, disintegration. A shadow theater. And yet the ghosts inhabiting it continue to tune their horns and violins, while an invisible audience still listens to their virtuoso performance. This organism still breathes—a carefree lethargic sleep. The video broadcast continues through the framed images—an homage to works of the Old Masters from the Hermitage’s classical collections.