In the Powder Tower: Gyatso
Tenzin Phuntsog, Gyatso, film still, 2024, courtesy of the artist
A 3-channel video installation in the Pulverturm (Powder Tower), Am Schlosswall, 26122 Oldenburg.
Opening hours: Friday 2pm to 6pm, Saturday and Sunday 11am to 6pm. Admission is free!
Tenzin Phuntsog is a Tibetan American artist and filmmaker working across moving image, film, and installation. His practice touches on themes of presence and belonging as well as landscape and language. Phuntsog belongs to the first generation of Tibetan exiles born abroad and are unable to return to their homeland and is interested in how art can mediate and transcend the limitations and absences in our lives. As such, his work repeatedly deals with questions of dislocation, longing, and the collective imagination of home and its interrupted relation to identity. The work’s Gyatso (Oceans) central notion—“imagining vastness and depth,” in the artist’s words—engages the visual possibilities and impossibilities that Tibetans face when coming into contact with the ocean, something that is present as a concept and metaphor in spiritual texts and something they once could only imagine from within their land-locked country. Phuntsog's project further touches on themes of displacement through focusing on the presence of perceived and absent landscapes within the body. His works capture an extended temporality in an attempt to portray his subjects’ embodiment of the present.
Tenzin Phuntsog currently lives and works in San Francisco, California, USA and is represented by Microscope Gallery in New York. He studied Media Arts at the University of California and holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Columbia University. His work has been exhibited and screened at prestigious galleries, museums and festivals including Berlinale Forum Expanded, Videobrasil, São Paulo; IFFR Rotterdam; Anthology Film Archives, New York; and The Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Tenzin Phuntsog received one of the grants for media art from the Stiftung Niedersachsen at the Haus für Medienkunst in 2023.
In the Pulverturm (Powder Tower), Am Schlosswall, 26122 Oldenburg
Opening hours: Friday 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Opening hours Night of the Museums: September 21, 2024, 11 a.m. to midnight
Admission is free!