Collaboration of Diana Chester, American artist based in Sydney and Mongolian artist Ariuntuya Jambaldorj explores the traces of water scarcity left in nature and human life.
ᠵᠠᡍᠠ᠊ᠬ | ЗААГ | ZAAG, a multimedia installation by resident artists of Nomadic Red Corner, Diana Chester and Ariuntuya Jambaldorj was presented at the Funkhaus, Ulaanbaatar on July 4th, 2023, as a part of the Lost Rivers 10-Day Lab. Exhibition 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 stayed at the Nomadic Red Corner for a week, then travelled 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 and in Ulaanbaatar. Artists collaborated with Mongolian throat singer Ashid Nergui for creating sound for Zam Zaag.
Lost Rivers Sound Motion Vision 10-Day Lab, an international program is curated by Gantuya Badamgarav, a founding director of the Mongolian Contemporary Art Support Association and organized by 976 Art Gallery and Blue Sun Art Center. The program was supported by U.S. Embassy in Ulaanbaatar, Goethe Institute and Taipei Trade and Economic Representative Office in Ulaanbaatar.
DIANA CHESTER
Chester is an internationally recognized digital media artist, educator and researcher using sound to explore more-than-human dimensions of understanding existence in the time of the Anthropocene. Their work uses sound, animation, and photography in conversation with ethnographic and archival materials, to convey ideas of pasts, presents, and futures. Driven by an intense desire to re-presence story and memory, Chester uses personal narratives as a method to voice to the world around them. To do so they fluidly explore multilingual, inter-environmental, and data generated soundscapes, finding rhythmic cadences and synergies from the natural world, and placing them in conversation with visual materials to compose “listening stories” that compel humans to think more deeply about inclusive ideas of place and belonging.
Current projects include the study of sound and culture focused on religion and the environment, the audio essay as a form of sonic scholarship, and new artistic methods and practices to sonify scientific data sets. Chester is the author of Sonic Encounters: The Islamic Call to Prayer, which gives a glimpse into the creative, methodological, and artistic implications of a 10-year research project making field recordings of (adhan) the Islamic call to prayer at mosques around the world. Chester’s broader body of work includes numerous journal articles, sonic compositions, and solo exhibitions in the United States, Australia, India, Sweden, Iceland, Mongolia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Chester is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Sydney and has held visiting academic positions at NYU’s TISCH School of the Arts and Duke University. Chester has been commissioned by the Smithsonian, been resident artist at Inter Arts Centre in Malmo, Sweden (2019), ArtsIceland in Ísafjörður, Iceland (2022), and Red Corner International Artist Residency in Mongolia (2023). Chester has been the recipient of a Sydney Environment Institute Collaborative Fellowship, has been named a Powerhouse Research Fellow at the Museum of Arts and Applied Sciences, and currently holds a visiting scholar appointment at the Oxford Center for Life-Writing and the University of Oxford.
ARIUNTUYA JAMBALDORJ
Ariuntuya Jambaldorj is a contemporary artist who was born in Mongolia, in 1992. She started attending monumental art class at Fine Art School at the Mongolian University of Arts and Culture in 2010 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 2014. The artworks of Ariuntuya are poetic. She worked with simple materials such as ink, watercolor, paper, rice paper, pen, thread, papier mâché and others. Her art conveys concepts and questions about the existence of the individual, the relations between man and nature; natural processes, time concepts through visual arts, multidisciplinary arts such as drawings, paintings, poems, installations, performances, public and video art.
She displayed her first solo exhibition titled “A Drop of Air” at 976 Art Gallery and a second solo exhibition “The Fountain” at Red Ger creative space, both in 2019. Her animation work ‘Thread’ won “the Best Animated Film” prize at the AKIFF- Altan Khalis International Film Festival in 2019. J.Ariuntuya has presented media artwork “Origin 21” under the theme ‘XXI’at the 6th Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival, organized by Arts Council of Mongolia and Art Week 2021, organized by the Ministry of Culture of Mongolia.
Ariuntuya conducted art classes in Munkhguru Center 2013-2015, Tsagaan Darium Art Gallery 2014-2015 and Erdem Center 2014-2017. She also attended Young Leadership in the Arts and Culture, a program organized by Arts Council of Mongolia and Young Leadership Program by Zorig Foundation. From 2015 to 2019, she was a co-founder and an artist at My Studio and the “Tara Lifestyle” brand. In 2016, 2017 she worked as visual artist and mentor for joint project “Re-Imagine Mongolia” by the Arts Council of Mongolia (ACM) and Swiss Cooperation in Mongolia (SCM).
In 2017, Ariuntuya worked on the organizational team of the National Pavilion of Mongolia at the 57th Venice Art Biennale. Since 2019, she has been working as an art teacher at Elite International School of Ulaanbaatar.
PHOTOS OF EXHIBITION
PHOTOS OF FIELD TRIP
