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International Program - Ulaanbaatar and Dundgobi Province, Mongolia
Aiming to revive resonance of ancient wisdom and to reexplore our relationship with nature, Lost Rivers - Sound Motion Vision 10-Day Lab, an international program was implemented in Mongolia from 4 to 14 July 2023, involving 39 artists from Germany, USA, UK, Austria, Australia, Taiwan, and Mongolia. The program took its name from Tuva-born Austrian experimental singer, composer, and artist Sainkho Namtchylak’s song Lost Rivers II, which is about disaster, despair, hope, and rebirth. The song depicts the rage of mountain spirit over the loss of its springs.
The list of the participants include, Sainkho Namtchylak, Shu Lea Cheang (Taiwanese American artist and filmmaker, based in Paris), Kaffe Matthews (British sound artist, composer, based in Berlin), Diana Chester (American sound and media artist based in Sydney), Fabian Cohn (Swiss choreographer, based in Berlin), Maria Dirneder (Austrian sound artist) and Mongolian artists Davaajargal Tsaschikher, Ariuntuya Jambaldorj, Erdene Sukhbaatar, Chinzorig Ryenchin-Ochir, Enkhjargal Ganbat and others. The program was curated by Gantuya Badamgarav, a founding director of the Mongolian Contemporary Art Support Association.
The program started with open discussion featuring Taiwanese American artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Chean, followed by several events held in Funkhaus, located in Zaisan area of Ulaanbaatar city, including ᠵᠠᡍᠠ᠊ᠬ | ЗААГ | ZAAG, a multimedia installation by Diana Chester and Ariuntuya Jambaldorj, Calligraphy of Sound by Sainkho Namtchylak, Chinzorig Ryenchin-Ochir and Erdene Sukhbaatar, Lost Rivers - Motion Performance with 18 artists and Sainkho Namtchylak, choreographed by Fabian Cohn and sound experiment by Kaffe Matthews and Davaajargal Tsaschikher. During the last days of the Lab, artists travelled to Ikh Gazriin Chuluu, Dundgobi province, a natural reserve – lined rock formation in massive area about 600 sq.km. Eighteen Mongolian and international artists joined the trip and explored the features of the landscape, the traces of the rivers that have disappeared, visited nomadic families, and documented artworks and performances artists completed on site.
DETAILED INFORMATION ON EVENTS, EXHIBITIONS AND FIELD TRIPS
Open discussion with Shu Lea Chean
On the first day of the Lost Rivers, 10-day international program, an open discussion featuring Taiwanese American artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Chean was held at the Foody Vegan Center. At the discussion, Shu Li shared her experiences on the lab projects she was involved in before, her film work with Tuva-born Austrian artist and singer Sainko Namchylak and exchanged ideas with artists about the Lost Rivers project. About 50 artists and art lovers attended the event, and the event was sponsored by the Taipei Trade and Economic Representative Office in Ulaanbaatar.
To briefly introduce Shu Lea, over the past decade, she has emerged as a prominent figure in new media art. She is one of the leading multimedia artists dealing with multidisciplinary topics. She is regarded as a pioneering figure in internet-based art, with her multimedia approach at the interface between film, video, internet-based installation, software interaction and durational performance. Her work is often interactive.
She is most noted for her individual approach in the realm of art and technology, creatively intermingling social issues with artistic methods. Shu Lea’s works have been exhibited in many museums around the world, including the world's leading museums such as London's Tate Modern, Paris's Pompidou, and New York's Guggenheim. In 2019, Shu Lea represented Taiwan at the 58th Venice Art Biennale.
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ᠵᠠᡍᠠ᠊ᠬ | ЗААГ | ZAAG, a multimedia installation by Diana Chester and Ariuntuya Jambaldorj
The exhibition entitled ZAAG, presented at the Funkhaus, Ulaanbaatar on July 4th, 2023, as a part of the Lost Rivers 10-Day Lab, implicates a border between life and death, beginning and end, and wet and dry (in case of Gobi). Zaag means in Mongolian a boundary or a border.
To develop this collaborative project, Diana and Ariuntuya have been travelling across the Gobi, covering over 1000 kilometers, visiting natural destinations such as Khongor Sand Dune, Bayan Zag, Yolyn Am Valley and Mukhar Shivert, exploring traces of the lost rivers, deep ice field, paleontological site, colorful limestone formation of a former ocean bed and desert and semi-desert areas in the Gobi, recording and documenting the sounds and images of the nature and collecting materials and ideas for the exhibition.
Artists presented two different works at the exhibition space. Combination of the branches of a saxaul, the melting ices, the random patterns created on the pigmented sand through the drips of the water and the ice cracking sound, placed along the mirror walls of the Funkhaus unfolds the hybrid narratives about the cyclic transformations of the nature and their impacts on human life. Another amazing media work created by two artists was a video and sound piece entitled Zam Zaag.
Through overlapping images of the people’s faces, arid lands, lost rivers, and deserts, combined with the sounds of the nature and throat singing, artists created a set of archaic, yet futuristic scenery, with the notion of human destiny. The work also explores the traces of water scarcity left in nature and human life. All works were created entirely from the materials they gathered and documented during the trip.
Calligraphy of Sound by Sainkho Namtchylak, Chinzorig Ryenchin-Ochir and Erdene Sukhbaatar
Tuva-born Austrian experimental singer, composer and artist Sainkho Namtchylak invited Mongolian artists Chinzorig Ryenchin-Ochir and Erdene Sukhbaatar to join Calligraphy of Sound, an art performance, which held at the Funkhaus, Ulaanbaatar on July 4th, 2023, as a part of the Lost Rivers 10-Day Lab.
Developed by Sainkho Namtchylak herself, Calligraphy of Sound is a live painting and singing act, the process of creating an image while having voice improvisation, at the end, it comes out as the form of spontaneously written music score of her singing meditation in the form of art object or picture. It is her way of scoring and writing music, in a similar way to 20th century experimental composers such as Stockhausen and John Cage did, using graphic scores, instead of traditional five lines scoring notations. Indeed, the diversity of sounds Sainkho produces with her voice is limitless, so obviously western classical notation is too limited to score different techniques of her throat singing, birdlike squawks, childlike pleas, and soulful crooning like sounds.
Motion performance with Sainkho Namtchylak, choreographed by Fabian Cohn
Inspired by Tuva born Austrian experimental singer, composer, and artist Sainkho Namtchylak’s performance Lost Rivers II, Gantuya Badamgarav, a curator of the international program Lost Rivers 10-Day Lab, had developed an idea for creating motion performance as a part of the Lab. Early March 2023, she contacted co-founder of YET Company, Swiss/German choreographer Fabian Cohn to choreograph the piece.
Through open call, Fabian and Gantuya selected diverse groups of 21 people, consisting of dancers, artists, and non-artists, most of whom never had any serious dance or movement training prior to the project. Right upon his arrival in Ulaanbaatar, Fabian started working intensely with a group for six full days and 18 of them ultimately presented the motion performance with Sainkho’s live improvisation on 5 July 2023 at Funkhaus, Ulaanbaatar.
Core idea of the performance was, as Fabian describes, ‘to embody the spirits that protect rivers and warn the public through our dance, like a shamans conduct rituals to re-nature and heal the environment. We aim to raise awareness about the pressing issue of water scarcity and the decline of rivers while instilling hope.
Hope and rebirth are precisely the final notes that conclude Sainkho’s Lost Rivers II, as she sings a calm and soothing lullaby after voicing monstrous screams and cries for lost rivers in earlier parts of the work. As Sainkho explained to the performers during their working process, “The end of the composition signifies a moment of rebirth, a new chance to learn and to trust again. After every disaster is a rebirth. Even if the river is gone, everything starts to bloom again. Life starts again; it’s a new life.
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Sound experiment by Kaffe Matthews and Davaajargal Tsaschikher
On the 3rd day of the Lost Rivers Lab project, fascinating experimental performance of British composer and sound artist Kaffe Matthews and Mongolian artist, composer, singer, and musician Davaajargal Tsaschikher was held at Funkhaus, located in Zaisan area of Ulaanbaatar city.
As described by Kaffe Matthews “Davaa painting melodic and gently colourful phrases that make skies over the Ripley’s dirt and earthbound throbbing basses, us flying then getting lost in some murk but re-emerging through thump and glitch beats that pulsed then pan across the chests of the audience, who are possibly figuring out this unusual sound that ascends then descends, and again, again, never repeating, later meshing geological before calming and landing to a fat still, and quiet, to close”.
Kaffe Matthews is a pioneering music maker who works live with space, data, things, and place to make new electroacoustic compositions, who started working in this area since 1992. The physical experience of music for the maker and listener has always been central to her approach and to this end she has also invented some unique interfaces, the sonic armchair, the sonic bed and the sonic bike that not only enable new approaches to composition for makers but give immediate ways into unfamiliar sound and music for wide ranging audience. Kaffe is a recipient of several international awards and Honorary Professor at the Shanghai Music Conservatory.
For Davaajargal “noise, sound and music are all notions of space” and he is interested in researching the relationship between physical and spiritual space. The intersections between time, rhythm and thought are his focus. Davaajargal presented Mongolia at Venice Art Biennale in 2017 along with other 4 Mongolian artists.
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A field trip to the Ikh Gazriin Chuluu, Dundgobi Province, Mongolia
An important part of the Lost Rivers international program is to travel to rural areas, especially the dry and arid areas of the Gobi and steppes, to study the features of the land, the traces of the rivers that have disappeared, and the changes that have occurred in the environment and lives of people and collect materials for artworks, create collaborative works and document them.
A team of 18 international artists worked for four days in the area of the Ikh Gazriin Chuluu of Dundgobi Province, visiting stunning formations of stone mountains, meeting nomadic people, looking at the traces of lost rivers and creating artworks. Total of 11 individual and joint works were created, including sound works and performances. This trip has been a fruitful for the artists to start their collaboration, to create works based on the collected materials, and to prepare for the exhibition. The exhibition based on this trip is expected to be organized by the end of 2023, in Ulaanbaatar.
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Photo credits: Chingis Batchuluun, Bat-Orgil Battulga, Gantuya Badamgarav, Jimmy Kao
International Program - Ulaanbaatar and Dundgobi Province, Mongolia
Aiming to revive resonance of ancient wisdom and to reexplore our relationship with nature, Lost Rivers - Sound Motion Vision 10-Day Lab, an international program was implemented in Mongolia from 4 to 14 July 2023, involving 39 artists from Germany, USA, UK, Austria, Australia, Taiwan, and Mongolia. The program took its name from Tuva-born Austrian experimental singer, composer, and artist Sainkho Namtchylak’s song Lost Rivers II, which is about disaster, despair, hope, and rebirth. The song depicts the rage of mountain spirit over the loss of its springs.
The list of the participants include, Sainkho Namtchylak, Shu Lea Cheang (Taiwanese American artist and filmmaker, based in Paris), Kaffe Matthews (British sound artist, composer, based in Berlin), Diana Chester (American sound and media artist based in Sydney), Fabian Cohn (Swiss choreographer, based in Berlin), Maria Dirneder (Austrian sound artist) and Mongolian artists Davaajargal Tsaschikher, Ariuntuya Jambaldorj, Erdene Sukhbaatar, Chinzorig Ryenchin-Ochir, Enkhjargal Ganbat and others. The program was curated by Gantuya Badamgarav, a founding director of the Mongolian Contemporary Art Support Association.
The program started with open discussion featuring Taiwanese American artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Chean, followed by several events held in Funkhaus, located in Zaisan area of Ulaanbaatar city, including ᠵᠠᡍᠠ᠊ᠬ | ЗААГ | ZAAG, a multimedia installation by Diana Chester and Ariuntuya Jambaldorj, Calligraphy of Sound by Sainkho Namtchylak, Chinzorig Ryenchin-Ochir and Erdene Sukhbaatar, Lost Rivers - Motion Performance with 18 artists and Sainkho Namtchylak, choreographed by Fabian Cohn and sound experiment by Kaffe Matthews and Davaajargal Tsaschikher. During the last days of the Lab, artists travelled to Ikh Gazriin Chuluu, Dundgobi province, a natural reserve – lined rock formation in massive area about 600 sq.km. Eighteen Mongolian and international artists joined the trip and explored the features of the landscape, the traces of the rivers that have disappeared, visited nomadic families, and documented artworks and performances artists completed on site.
DETAILED INFORMATION ON EVENTS, EXHIBITIONS AND FIELD TRIPS
Open discussion with Shu Lea Chean
On the first day of the Lost Rivers, 10-day international program, an open discussion featuring Taiwanese American artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Chean was held at the Foody Vegan Center. At the discussion, Shu Li shared her experiences on the lab projects she was involved in before, her film work with Tuva-born Austrian artist and singer Sainko Namchylak and exchanged ideas with artists about the Lost Rivers project. About 50 artists and art lovers attended the event, and the event was sponsored by the Taipei Trade and Economic Representative Office in Ulaanbaatar.
To briefly introduce Shu Lea, over the past decade, she has emerged as a prominent figure in new media art. She is one of the leading multimedia artists dealing with multidisciplinary topics. She is regarded as a pioneering figure in internet-based art, with her multimedia approach at the interface between film, video, internet-based installation, software interaction and durational performance. Her work is often interactive.
She is most noted for her individual approach in the realm of art and technology, creatively intermingling social issues with artistic methods. Shu Lea’s works have been exhibited in many museums around the world, including the world's leading museums such as London's Tate Modern, Paris's Pompidou, and New York's Guggenheim. In 2019, Shu Lea represented Taiwan at the 58th Venice Art Biennale.
ᠵᠠᡍᠠ᠊ᠬ | ЗААГ | ZAAG, a multimedia installation by Diana Chester and Ariuntuya Jambaldorj
The exhibition entitled ZAAG, presented at the Funkhaus, Ulaanbaatar on July 4th, 2023, as a part of the Lost Rivers 10-Day Lab, implicates a border between life and death, beginning and end, and wet and dry (in case of Gobi). Zaag means in Mongolian a boundary or a border.
To develop this collaborative project, Diana and Ariuntuya have been travelling across the Gobi, covering over 1000 kilometers, visiting natural destinations such as Khongor Sand Dune, Bayan Zag, Yolyn Am Valley and Mukhar Shivert, exploring traces of the lost rivers, deep ice field, paleontological site, colorful limestone formation of a former ocean bed and desert and semi-desert areas in the Gobi, recording and documenting the sounds and images of the nature and collecting materials and ideas for the exhibition.
Artists presented two different works at the exhibition space. Combination of the branches of a saxaul, the melting ices, the random patterns created on the pigmented sand through the drips of the water and the ice cracking sound, placed along the mirror walls of the Funkhaus unfolds the hybrid narratives about the cyclic transformations of the nature and their impacts on human life. Another amazing media work created by two artists was a video and sound piece entitled Zam Zaag.
Through overlapping images of the people’s faces, arid lands, lost rivers, and deserts, combined with the sounds of the nature and throat singing, artists created a set of archaic, yet futuristic scenery, with the notion of human destiny. The work also explores the traces of water scarcity left in nature and human life. All works were created entirely from the materials they gathered and documented during the trip.
Calligraphy of Sound by Sainkho Namtchylak, Chinzorig Ryenchin-Ochir and Erdene Sukhbaatar
Tuva-born Austrian experimental singer, composer and artist Sainkho Namtchylak invited Mongolian artists Chinzorig Ryenchin-Ochir and Erdene Sukhbaatar to join Calligraphy of Sound, an art performance, which held at the Funkhaus, Ulaanbaatar on July 4th, 2023, as a part of the Lost Rivers 10-Day Lab.
Developed by Sainkho Namtchylak herself, Calligraphy of Sound is a live painting and singing act, the process of creating an image while having voice improvisation, at the end, it comes out as the form of spontaneously written music score of her singing meditation in the form of art object or picture. It is her way of scoring and writing music, in a similar way to 20th century experimental composers such as Stockhausen and John Cage did, using graphic scores, instead of traditional five lines scoring notations. Indeed, the diversity of sounds Sainkho produces with her voice is limitless, so obviously western classical notation is too limited to score different techniques of her throat singing, birdlike squawks, childlike pleas, and soulful crooning like sounds.
Motion performance with Sainkho Namtchylak, choreographed by Fabian Cohn
Inspired by Tuva born Austrian experimental singer, composer, and artist Sainkho Namtchylak’s performance Lost Rivers II, Gantuya Badamgarav, a curator of the international program Lost Rivers 10-Day Lab, had developed an idea for creating motion performance as a part of the Lab. Early March 2023, she contacted co-founder of YET Company, Swiss/German choreographer Fabian Cohn to choreograph the piece.
Through open call, Fabian and Gantuya selected diverse groups of 21 people, consisting of dancers, artists, and non-artists, most of whom never had any serious dance or movement training prior to the project. Right upon his arrival in Ulaanbaatar, Fabian started working intensely with a group for six full days and 18 of them ultimately presented the motion performance with Sainkho’s live improvisation on 5 July 2023 at Funkhaus, Ulaanbaatar.
Core idea of the performance was, as Fabian describes, ‘to embody the spirits that protect rivers and warn the public through our dance, like a shamans conduct rituals to re-nature and heal the environment. We aim to raise awareness about the pressing issue of water scarcity and the decline of rivers while instilling hope.
Hope and rebirth are precisely the final notes that conclude Sainkho’s Lost Rivers II, as she sings a calm and soothing lullaby after voicing monstrous screams and cries for lost rivers in earlier parts of the work. As Sainkho explained to the performers during their working process, “The end of the composition signifies a moment of rebirth, a new chance to learn and to trust again. After every disaster is a rebirth. Even if the river is gone, everything starts to bloom again. Life starts again; it’s a new life.
Sound experiment by Kaffe Matthews and Davaajargal Tsaschikher
On the 3rd day of the Lost Rivers Lab project, fascinating experimental performance of British composer and sound artist Kaffe Matthews and Mongolian artist, composer, singer, and musician Davaajargal Tsaschikher was held at Funkhaus, located in Zaisan area of Ulaanbaatar city.
As described by Kaffe Matthews “Davaa painting melodic and gently colourful phrases that make skies over the Ripley’s dirt and earthbound throbbing basses, us flying then getting lost in some murk but re-emerging through thump and glitch beats that pulsed then pan across the chests of the audience, who are possibly figuring out this unusual sound that ascends then descends, and again, again, never repeating, later meshing geological before calming and landing to a fat still, and quiet, to close”.
Kaffe Matthews is a pioneering music maker who works live with space, data, things, and place to make new electroacoustic compositions, who started working in this area since 1992. The physical experience of music for the maker and listener has always been central to her approach and to this end she has also invented some unique interfaces, the sonic armchair, the sonic bed and the sonic bike that not only enable new approaches to composition for makers but give immediate ways into unfamiliar sound and music for wide ranging audience. Kaffe is a recipient of several international awards and Honorary Professor at the Shanghai Music Conservatory.
For Davaajargal “noise, sound and music are all notions of space” and he is interested in researching the relationship between physical and spiritual space. The intersections between time, rhythm and thought are his focus. Davaajargal presented Mongolia at Venice Art Biennale in 2017 along with other 4 Mongolian artists.
A field trip to the Ikh Gazriin Chuluu, Dundgobi Province, Mongolia
An important part of the Lost Rivers international program is to travel to rural areas, especially the dry and arid areas of the Gobi and steppes, to study the features of the land, the traces of the rivers that have disappeared, and the changes that have occurred in the environment and lives of people and collect materials for artworks, create collaborative works and document them.
A team of 18 international artists worked for four days in the area of the Ikh Gazriin Chuluu of Dundgobi Province, visiting stunning formations of stone mountains, meeting nomadic people, looking at the traces of lost rivers and creating artworks. Total of 11 individual and joint works were created, including sound works and performances. This trip has been a fruitful for the artists to start their collaboration, to create works based on the collected materials, and to prepare for the exhibition. The exhibition based on this trip is expected to be organized by the end of 2023, in Ulaanbaatar.
Photo credits: Chingis Batchuluun, Bat-Orgil Battulga, Gantuya Badamgarav, Jimmy Kao