5th Land Art Mongolia — a beautiful, mystic, unexplored plains
Somewhere in the surrounding plains of Murun soum of Khentii province in Mongolia, a very noticeable string is floating above the camp of ger’s /yurt/ into a type of pointytopped rock mountain, its the work of Bat-Erdene Batchuluun one of the 23 selected artists participating at the 5th Land Art Biennial. This year the 5th edition of Land Art Bien- nial is organised at the Eco Khentii camp located 5 km from Murun soum of Khentii Province, six hours drive from Ulaanbaatar city. Camp itself is totally isolated from any mobile network, giving peculiar image of the nomadic lifestyle. Participating artists will be accommodated in traditionally shared gers located in vast rural mountainous setting and with nomadic families as neighbours will pursue their own work in a communal environment for seven days.
Land Art Biennial is organised by LAM360 NGO every two years in isolated locations across the plains of Mongolia, open call for proposals invite artists from every corner of the world. This year the venue is curated by Lewis Biggs former Tate Liverpool curator, currently chief curator for the Folkestone Triennial along with assistant curator Solongoo Tseekhuu, they selected 23 international artists from different backgrounds to spawn un- der the slogan “Opening a dialogue on current human values”.
This year i had opportunity to travel to the site, i was accompanied by the camera man who was hired for the Swiss television SRF2 to make a short report on venue. Upon our arrival at the site, we have met artist Sophie Guyot /b.1970/ from Lausanne, Switzerland she was in the middle of her work progress. Sophie is a conceptual artist known for her light installations. She often uses words and signs always ending with the question mark. She explains it “My artwork that will include not only the people who will see it, but also the people who live here, link maker that will link people, and artwork will provoke light discussion”. Her work for the biennale is a site specific installation with two sides, first is the documented interaction with local nomadic horse herding people. It will be about our relation with the horses, local horse breeders helped Sophie to exchange values and sto- ries about horse breeding practices, because Sophie’s mother was a horse breeder.
ЦОГИО? -CANTER? -CALOP? — by Sophie Gouyot 2018
5th Land Art Mongolia Biennial
Photography: Bat-Orgil.B, photo courtesy of LAM360
And she came up with a word “ ЦОГИО? -CANTER? -CALOP? ” in Cyrillic script. Second part is the installation on the mountain by 100 x 30 meters, she will plant sticks of wood where on top of each stick there will be attached red bicycle lights that will light up during the night and all those dots will make up a word that can only be read from a specific point.
“We have space and time here, its a
luxury and also perfect thing in the world Sophie Guyot
The root of Mongolia’s earth art can go back to very ancient times. Ancient constructions, early complexes of burials and other monuments visibly seen across the plains of Mongo- lia that can date from the Stone Age. Stone sculptures, rock-paintings, burial sepulchres are very valuable materials for studying the primordial art. The first official land art event in Mongolia was initiated by Dalkh-Ochir Yondonjunai artist and curator of Green Horse Collective started a project in 1997 under the title Earth Art, then from 2004 the Blue Sun Contemporary Art Group in collaboration with Swedish Institute they co- organised first international land art project in Mongolia under the theme “Art Camp”, the site was chosen at the Undurulaan mountain of Tuv Province, including artists from Sweden, Mongolia, Great Britain and Japan making earthworks resulting to a joint exhibition with workshops and conversation events. In 2008 the Arts Council of Mongolia carried out land art venue under the title “Time and Space”. And the very first Land Art Mongolia Biennial is organised by LAM 360° NGO since 2010, founded by artistic couple Marc Schmitz and Dolgor Ser-Od, their contribution to land art in Mongolia is vital. The 5th Land Art Mongolia Biennial was cited at the Sotheby’s art travel guide by Tim Marlow the artistic director of RAA for one of the must-see museum shows of summer 2018.
On the side hills of the pointy rocky mountain i encountered artist Zheng Lu, he lives and works in Beijing but was born in Inner Mongolia, China. Lu is concerned about the loss of cultural diversity in Asia that resulting from global homogenisation. His practice touches upon a wide range of art forms including installation, sculpture, media, stage and public art which are deeply influenced by his study of traditional Chinese calligraphy. At the site a saw an adhesive tape that was stretched from the two wooden poles that are fixed on the tip of rocky boulders that were 20 meters apart, while the artist was working on the second part of the installation where in nearby crevasse Lu was setting up three more screens with adhesive tapes laid out in a manner that resembled commercial banners, only instead of canvas there is a tape that will collect whatever was to be brought by wind: visible and invisible, organic and inorganic fragments and particles from the landscape. In this work Lu describes that the wind is the dominant element in the landscape, that becomes the ‘active principle’, moving particles around as humans moved around the globe by forces that my be powerful but also invincible. The two-dimensionality of the collection of dust on the adhesive tape makes it like a drawing.
FRAGMENT — by Zheng Lu
2018
5th Land Art Mongolia Biennial
Photo: Batjil.B, ArtAvenue.mn
When confronted by a two-dimensional recording, are we able to imagine a full life in three dimensions? Zheng’s attention to the inconspicuous is a way to pay acknowledge and respect the diversity of unique particles that together go to form the landscape.
I also had an interesting conversation with Junichiro Iwase, Canadian artist of Japanese ancestry, lives and works in British Colombia. Iwase is known for his sculptures and paintings on eggshell as a main theme of his work, natural representation of eggshell that can resemble inside and outside space draws Iwase to explore alternative views about con- temporary society. Encountering site-work is often filtered through the knowledge of the beholder. The art that which is represented in a site can create context’s that connects and divides the work/viewer relation. Junichiro Iwase sets about exploring how a tension between sculpture and space can be continuously evoked. The subject of his piece created at the biennial, was Land Scale — ‘Let us measure nature with nature itself’. Junichiro Iwase intends to open up conversations about the relationship between ‘human’ and ‘nature’ in our contemporary context of globalisation. Ultimately, this installation hopes to yield insights to address the theme “Who are we now?”
Land Scale, takes its inspiration from the carpenter’s tool known as a level. This level serves as a metaphor for ‘balance’, both conceptually and materially. It is represented as a long cylindrical container filled with just enough coloured fluid to allow the water to level itself horizontally in relation to the land.
Land Scale by Junichiro Iwase
2018
5th Land Art Mongolia Biennial Site-specific installation: Levelling water
Photo courtesy: Bat-Orgil.B, LAM360
With Murum Sum / Khentii Aimag as the environment, the installation will function as a barometer of balance between humanity and na- ture, a topic that is more important now than ever before in human history. So i came into conclusion that Land Art in general helps us to map our location in the world.
I came across Odmaa Uranchimeg in her work in progress at the far end of the camp. Odmaa is emerging contemporary artist, she proudly speaks for her national heritage, exposing Mongolia’s society in all its complexity. Odmaa is emerging ceramics artist that works and lives in Ulaanbaatar Mongolia, she is well known for her works and installations using ceramics. Odmaa Uranchimeg‘s artwork “ My Inner Is In The Inside 2” for LAM 2018 is a pair of big white wings that can be attached to a ger. It follows a previous work, in which she at- tached a small pair of wings to a sheep. When the sheep moved, the wings moved too, as if the sheep was flying. She felt that the wings gave the animal more freedom and ex- pressed its innate majesty and characteristics.
Both works derive from the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with the principle that ‘move- ment itself is balance’. The wings are a representation of movement, and the idea of movement allows all objects to take on greater dignity. Normally, we are forgetful of the fact that everything moves. By attaching wings to inanimate objects Odmaa shows us that everything is in movement; and because everything is in movement, everything also has the opportunity to restore its own balance.
My Inner Is In The Inside 2 by Odmaa Uranchimeg
2018
5th Land Art Mongolia Biennial
Site-specific installation: pair of big wings attached to a ger
Photo courtesy: Batjil.B, ArtAvenue.mn
As Odmaa says: ‘Everything is created by movement. There are unseen movements, changes, and shifts happening all around us. Our nature, society, and tradition, all things move and change. In modern times, everything moves so fast. Industrialisation brought upon us global warming and we are trying to find ways to counter the warming and survive with it.’
‘Our earth heals itself. It creates balance within itself and around it, but humans are de- stroying that balance. We should give our earth a chance to heal itself. We can find a way to live with our nature from nomadic culture. The mining industry is destroying our no- madic culture and environment but culture itself has a power to survive it.’ Odmaa.U
Tanya P Johnson is a visual artist based in the Slocan Valley, British Columbia and part time in Cape Town, South Africa. Johnson has translated her visual language into various media including paper cutting, printmaking, collage, installation, design, painting in public spaces and collaboration with playwrights and choreographers. Her art practice examines edges, belonging, real history, thresholds, the unseen and relationship with land. She is interested in the supernatural, transformation, culture, language, cosmology and ancestors.
Story Keepers by Tanya P Johnson
2018
5th Land Art Mongolia Biennial Site-specific installation: collected objects
Photo courtesy: Bat-Orgil.B, LAM360
After arriving in Murun, Tanya Johnson’s approach to her work was informed by interact- ing with the people and witnessing their ways of belonging to their culture and land. She spent two days writing stories to the land, making an ‘offering’ of seven stories while walk- ing clockwise around the auspicious mountain that overlooks the camp site near Murun Sum. The stories were written in flour, salt and water and were meant as a way of feeding the land. This was a consciously ceremonial or ritualistic prelude to the work that fol- lowed.
The artist writes: ‘the Anthropomorphs are inspired by the ancient Mongolian mythical and supernatural winged bird-humans called the Galbinga. They have been assembled from found and natural objects. The integrated musical instrument parts are symbolic of vehi- cles for story. An invented text called wordmaps, that contain the history and residue of trade, human interaction and a self prescribed protocol (that sanctions the borrowing of words from a culture that is not my own), is inscribed on the instruments. The meanings of the included words are: song, breath, story, laughter and dream. The chosen colours and motifs are suggestive of ger boxes and doors. She had a way of alluding to ger chest drawers, further reference is made to the idea of holding or containing stories and trea- sured family objects. Tanya Johnson’s “Story Keepers” installation could be considered both site-specific art and land art (also know as earth art or earthworks). Tanya Johnson made an installation juxtaposing nature with a thread that binds the work is the reference to sewing and story-as-thread that binds the world, binds humans to one another, to their culture and to the land.’
My inspiration for this work (is layered, of course) comes from my perception of the cosmologies and ways of expressing relationship with the unseen that I have witnessed in Mongolia. This includes offerings seen in the temples, milk offerings and the knowing of, but as yet not experienced, practice of Shamanism. Tanya P.Johnson
Tanya’s work intrigued me to think that the development of linguistics and semiology, our century has practically discovered the preponderant role of language in the formation of psychic and thought processes. If the best of literature has based its raison d’être on the very mechanism of writing (Proust, Mallarmé, Joyce), the possibility of language to be an intrinsic source of artifice and illusion has also been revealed, as had already been un- derstood in the case of painting or the picture.
A Nomadic Diptych by Ronald Van Der Meij
2018
5th Land Art Mongolia Biennial
Site-specific installation: solar powered self playing nomadic instruments
Photo courtesy: Bat-Orgil.B, LAM360
Artist Ronald Van Der Meij traveled 14,000 kilometers in the former Silk Road path during sixteen days he documented perspectives of traditional nomadic music in its contempo- rary manifestation. Along the way artist collected nomadic instruments from the journey that testifies diversity of nomadic cultures in Central Asia. The work for the biennial is “A Nomadic Diptych” consists of the collected instruments self-played using solar panels and construction techniques derived from nomadic tent. While location brings the instru- ments to life in a sound composition determined by the rhythms of nature (sun, clouds, wind). This ‘play’ of the elements shows similarities to human music — the resulting com- position of pitch and tone of which the instruments are capable. This is, after all, similar to the way in which people respond to their environment. Here the modern and traditional go hand in hand in looking for a universal language for humanity, Ronald describes.
On the August 10 the presentational exhibition of the 5th Land Art Mongolia Biennial was staged at the Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery, the show consisted mostly documentations of the site specific installations and works. Sometimes the documentation is the work, because it is impossible to experience it in the galley environment. By presenting the work and ideas of artists from diverse cultural backgrounds and from different generations, biennial aims to trigger a discussion and raise awareness about our human values within time and space.
We are interested to open a discussion on human values today that will be shared in one of the most remote areas on the globe for a display at the Biennial venues of the capital Ulaanbaatar to en- hance a mutual ex- change on these issues.” Lewis Biggs
Overall my impression for this year’s biennial exceeded my expectations, and i think that land art for the artists is essential, it is the fuel and source of everything they do else- where in the gallery or studios.
“The relation of a Non-site to the Site is also like that of language to the world: it is a signi- fier and the Site is that which is signified” by Robert Smithson
Art, if it is to be good for anything, must ask that question about the place of being within the Whole, natural, social and cultural. An art of few words and even fewer images, but so close to the life we could believe, if we were capable of that readiness required, that this art could lead us to see and feel those things which have been forbidden to us.
Batjil Bayar
