Gyatso
We are pleased to realise the first institutional solo exhibition with Tenzin Phuntsog in Germany. He is a scholarship holder of the Stiftung Niedersachsen at the House for Media Art 2023.
From the jury's statement:
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. 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—will engage the visual possibilities and impossibilities that Tibetans face when coming into contact with the ocean, 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. The jury found Phuntsog’s visual language refined and consistent, and offering special insight into the experience of time. His works capture an extended temporality in an attempt to portray his subjects’ embodiment of the present.