Mystery lands

2022 — present

The project by the Glish group grew out of their research into the concept of “home” in the context of emigration. After relocating to San Francisco, the artists were confronted with displacement and the challenge of belonging in an unfamiliar environment. To respond, they developed a practice of layering past and present: projecting photographs from their lives in Russia onto the walls of their apartment and onto their own bodies, creating images in which memory and present reality intersect. In this way, nostalgia was transformed into attachment, offering a means to reimagine belonging and to renegotiate the experience of exile.

The project was published in See-zeen, “Nomadic Future: A Visual Dialogue with Red Rubber Road.”

At the same time, the artists extended this search into their immediate surroundings near Glen Canyon. Although situated within a global hub of technology, the canyon retains a raw, desolate aura, inhabited by coyotes and resonant with the myths of Indigenous tribes who once lived there. In its terrain they recognized echoes of nomadic dwellings and Indigenous presence—long vanished, yet still inscribed in the land. Through documentary footage interwoven with reenactments, they explored how landscape, myth, and memory converge, and how these convergences might shape a new sense of home.