Mongolian artist Enkhbold Togmidshiirev is known for his large-scale, monochromatic canvases, as well as his Ger Project performances. Togmidshiirev staged an improvised roving performance in the outdoor spaces surrounding the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) for The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) opening weekend as part of his ongoing Ger Project.
Since 2008, Togmidshiirev has created a number of personalised structures derived from the form of the Mongolian ger, or yurt, with which he performs as a way of developing a connection with his surroundings. The ger, a large circular tent with a collapsible wooden infrastructure, is robust and portable, and highly suited to a nomadic lifestyle. Setting up a ger creates a temporary home that Togmidshiirev equates to a spiritual space. The performance commenced on the Kurilpa Bridge, with Enkhbold making his way across it before concluding the performance in the GOMA Forecourt.
Watch the performance
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Enkhbold Togmidshiirev staged an improvised roving performance in the outdoor spaces surrounding GOMA from 10.00am on Sunday 25 November 2018 for the opening weekend of APT9, as part of his ongoing Ger Project. / View full image
Enkhbold Togmidshiirev concluding the performance in the GOMA Forecourt
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The spherical Blue Sentient 2015 features in an APT9 opening weekend performance, and as a sculptural installation in the Gallery. / View full image
The spherical Blue Sentient 2015 featured in the APT9 opening weekend performance, and as a sculptural installation in the Gallery is on display with Togmidshiirev’s restrained colour-field paintings which incorporate unusual media – horse dung, felt, shrubs, ash, rust, sheep skin and tripe – which are either laid over the canvas or worked into its fibres. Togmidshiirev also incorporates collage into his paintings, while fabrics such as cotton, silk and hessian vary their surfaces. Their materiality, like the ger performances they complement, preserves a strong connection with both traditional and contemporary Mongolian life.
Delve deeper into APT9 with Mithu Sen Mithu Sen works in a variety of media to explore and subvert hierarchical codes and rules. Through various devices and interventions she challenges our standards of social exchange, undermining the codes we come to rely on and recalibrating types of interaction.
Watch Mithu Sen’s APT9 performance
SUBSCRIBE to QAGOMA YouTube to go behind-the-scenes at events and exhibitions / Mithu Sen, India b.1971 / UnMYthU: UnKIND(s) Alternatives Performance / 24 November 2018, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane / Live performance with Alexa device / Commissioned for ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) / Courtesy: The artist and Gallery Chemould, Mumbai / © Mithu Sen
Subscribe to QAGOMA YouTube to be the first to go behind-the-scenes / Watch or Read more about Asia Pacific artistsView the work of Enkhbold Togmidshiirev and more on Level 3 at the Gallery of Modern Art until 16 June 2019 during ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ APT9: Extended.
Buy the APT9 publication Read more in The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
Feature image: Enkhbold Togmidshiirev’s improvised roving performance in the outdoor spaces surrounding GOMA for the APT9 opening weekend as part of his ongoing Ger Project.
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Enkhbold Togmidshiirev is a painter and performance and installation artist best known for his large-scale, monochromatic canvases executed in materials derived from his nomadic culture, and improvised performances using the ger, the traditional Mongolian home.
Created in parallel to his performance work, Enkhbold’s restrained colour-field paintings incorporate unusual media — horse dung, felt, shrubs, ash, rust, sheep skin and tripe — which are either laid over the canvas or worked into its fibres.
These materials are sourced from the countryside, when the artist returns to his homeland, and undergo extensive preparation before he uses them in his paintings. The dung, for instance, is dried and crumbled, and sifted three times to ensure a fine consistency. It is then applied over a base of gelatine and gel, or mixed into the base directly, after which it is covered in acrylic paint. Horse dung can differ in colour and texture depending on the season and the specific environmental conditions of the animals, and so the material provides the artist with a shifting palette.
Occasionally, Enkhbold incorporates collage into his paintings, and fabrics such as cotton, silk and hessian vary the surfaces of his works, introducing formal devices like Rothko-esque horizontal fields through stitching and textural contrast.
Enkhbold’s vast planes of colour and tone are determined exercises in abstraction, an abstraction that the artist also emphasises in the form of his performative ger. It is the materiality of his works, like the performances they complement, that preserves a strong connection with both traditional and contemporary Mongolian life.
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Benevolence 2013
The surface of the left panel of this painting is constructed from strips of silk in vivid sapphire, while the right panel is a highly textured compound of rust and acrylic medium. The blue silk, known as khadag, is a traditional sign of benevolence, offered to elders, married couples and others as a gift of long life and happiness. The khadag used here is one of two the artist inherited from his parents, and is one of many personal items that have found their way into his artworks. The inclusion of the square of rust is part of a strategy of creating dialogues between different materials. For Togmidshiirev, the square format represents stillness, and is a shape he finds meditative.
Born and raised in rural Mongolia, Enkhbold was taught traditional woodcarving by his parents, and studied art at a private technical college in Ulaanbaatar as a young adult. His later studies at the Institute of Fine Art saw him tutored by Enkhbat Lantuu, one of the few Mongolian artists working with abstraction at the time. Lantuu encouraged Enkhbold’s conceptual bent, which developed further on contact with the Blue Sun Contemporary Art Group, and its founder Dalkh-Ochir Yondonjunai, an important interpreter of the work of postwar German artist Joseph Beuys, whose persona and use of unconventional materials are an abiding influence on contemporary art in post-Soviet Mongolia.
Watch Enkhbold Togmidshiirev’s performance
SUBSCRIBE to QAGOMA YouTube to go behind-the-scenes at events and exhibitions / Enkhbold Togmidshiirev’s improvised roving performance, 10.00am Sunday 25 November 2018 at GOMA
Arguably, Enkhbold has attained his greatest visibility through his performances, most notably his Ger Project. The ger is at once robust and eminently portable, highly suited both to a nomadic lifestyle and to low-cost living in Mongolia’s crowded capital.
Since 2008, Enkhbold has created a number of personalised structures derived from the form — the bowed, wooden latticework of Blue sentient 2015, for example, takes on a spherical shape — in order to forge a connection with his surroundings. Setting up a ger creates a temporary home that Enkhbold equates to a spiritual space. His improvised performances have taken place on the frozen steppes (plains) of Mongolia, in the desert, at the edge of the sea, by the side of a highway — sometimes in visual harmony with their surroundings, and in apparent contrast at others.
Reuben Keehan is Curator, Contemporary Asian Art. QAGOMA
Subscribe to QAGOMA YouTube to be the first to go behind-the-scenes / Watch or Read more about Asia Pacific artists
View the work of Enkhbold Togmidshiirev and more on Level 3 at the Gallery of Modern Art until 16 June 2019 during ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ APT9: Extended.
Buy the APT9 publication
Read more in The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art available online or in-store. The publication represents an important and lasting document of the current artistic landscape of Australia, Asia and the Pacific.
APT9 has been assisted by our Founding Supporter Queensland Government and Principal Partner the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
Feature image detail: Enkhbold Togmidshiirev Benevolence (Detail) 2013
#EnkhboldTogmidshiirev #APT9 #QAGOMA
Women’s Wealth is a collaboration between QAGOMA and three Buka women: co-curator Sana Balai and artists Taloi and Marilyn Havini. Inspiration for the project originated in these women’s shared dream.
Sana Balai, Independent Curator, Community Elder, and co-curator of the Women’s Wealth exhibition at ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) gives a background to the art project that engages with the ongoing importance and richness of women’s creativity.
Sana Balai discusses the importance of Women’s Wealth
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Where are the women makers?
Observing art exhibitions over the past two decades, artists from Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands have been highly represented; however, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville and its neighbours in the Solomon Islands — Choiseul and Shortland — have had little or no representation at all. There is also a tendency for Melanesian art to be thought of as ‘art made by men’. Where are the women makers from the islands of the Solomon Sea? Women’s Wealth is one answer, and was born out of conversations involving Ruth McDougall, QAGOMA’s Curator of Pacific Art, artist Taloi Havini and me over the last five years. After 20 years working in the museum sector in Australia, I felt this project offered us an opportunity to draw attention to this largely overlooked region of the Asia Pacific. In effect, the Women’s Wealth project was a blank canvas.
Once the pride of the Pacific with its serene ocean views and picturesque landscapes, Bougainville has been almost completely destroyed by the Bougainville crisis. This recent history has significantly impacted the people in many ways, and they hold unspoken and painful secrets as a result. In this context, galleries and art centres are non-existent. Singing, dancing, carving, weaving and painting are practised, but ‘art’ is a Western word or concept that people are not familiar with; instead, ‘craft’ is the word widely used when referring to aesthetic expression.
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Research for Women’s Wealth started on Buka Island in April 2017. We were welcomed by the Hakö Women’s Collective and the Yumi Yet Bamboo Band from Lontis village. With guidance from teacher Marilyn Havini, we visited markets, met with artists and visited communities. We talked about the project, its focus on women, and its presentation in APT9. Our research then took us to the main island of Bougainville. We were visiting communities severely affected by the crisis, and we didn’t know what we would find. McDougall worked with the women, showed them images of artworks, and sat with them weaving, drawing and encouraging them to teach her Tok Pisin. I sat with the men, discussed cultural protocols and the importance of keeping our culture alive through art. McDougall and I emphasised the importance of protecting their cultural knowledge.
A similar trip to Taro Island on Choiseul in the Solomon Islands involved meeting artists both at the markets and through McDougall’s contacts from previous visits to Honiara. As part of this trip, nine artists from Bougainville, four from the Solomon Islands and four artists from Australia were selected to participate in a special workshop in Chabai. The Nazareth Rehabilitation Centre in Chabai plays an important role in Bougainville society, as it protects women and children affected by violence. The first day of the workshop was challenging: women didn’t know one another and language and self-confidence were proving barriers to participation. On the second day, everyone was excited, and by the fifth day, everyone asked: ‘Are we going back next week?’. Women shared materials, taught each other techniques and talked about their art and culture. As one artist shared with me:
We are not looking forward to next week because what we have worked out together is that here we are not wives, we are not mothers or grandmothers, we are just women doing what we love to do.
The Bougainville Women’s Wealth project began as a blank canvas, a canvas that is now filled with stories, both traditional and contemporary. It is proof of a living culture with a wealth of knowledge. The women of Bougainville are the holders of cultural knowledge; it is their wealth — this is their story.
Sana Balai, Co-curator Women’s Wealth
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The importance of women’s voices
Ruth McDougall, Curator of Pacific Art at QAGOMA highlights the inspiration for a project to develop understanding of the Bougainville and Solomon Islands region, and to provide Bougainville women with opportunities to engage in new creative conversations.
Women’s Wealth is a project highlighting the importance of women’s voices in the predominantly matrilineal societies of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville and the nearby provinces of the Solomon Islands. At the heart of the project is a belief in the capacity of art to both engage diverse audiences in new understandings, and contribute to sustainable and socially cohesive communities. Focusing on vibrant cultural practices, such as weaving, pottery and body adornment, Women’s Wealth celebrates the ways in which indigenous women create forms of great aesthetic and cultural significance, assert continuing connections to people and place, and transfer knowledge and maintain livelihoods, as well as affirm a sense of collective agency and authority.
Related: Women’s Wealth Interactive Tour
As part of this project, Bougainville women were reconnected with artists from the nearby Solomon Islands, with whom they share strong linguistic and cultural ties, but who are divided by political boundaries. A small, predominantly Indigenous, group of artists from Australia working in similar media were also invited to participate in the project. To launch Women’s Wealth, a group of 19 women from across these three regions came together for a ten-day workshop in September 2017.
As a result of this workshop, the artists produced a range of different artworks for APT9. Many artists asked members of their community to authorise the creation of specific cultural forms and to assist in finishing works...
