In the legends, it is told that the Kyrgyz were asleep while God was distributing land to the people on Earth. When the Kyrgyz woke up, they realized they hadn’t been given any land, and begged God to give them something at least. Feeling pity for the unfortunate Kyrgyz, God gave them the piece of land he intended to keep as his own… It was a beautiful piece of land, with chains of mountains crisscrossing it.

After learning of this myth, we started to think about our connection to the land of Kyrgyz as something extraordinary – here the land is our bridge to the skies. Whether or not we know of this as a fact, or if it is merely a legend, the story compelled artists to think: where do we come from? Even if we don’t always stay in the same place, people still carry reminders of their land wherever they go.

Six artists in this exhibition, from the United States, Mexico, and Kyrgyzstan participated together in the 2023 edition of the Nomadic Art Project, a program curated by artist Shaarbek Amankul. By learning about the tradition of nomadism together with local Kyrgyzstanis, artists began to reflect on the contemporary meaning of “Nomadism”. Through their diverse multicultural background and media, the artists respond to these questions in this exhibition  “Packs of Land”.

The term “Nomads” in this exhibition is discussed as a fluid concept, one linked with migration, and considers what “Nomadism” implies in a contemporary context. Artists from this exhibition reflect on their experience of traveling and their time in Kyrgyzstan, echoing the blurred boundaries between their ethnicity, culture, and land. Through creative means, they connect their own culture and tradition with local iconography.

The inspiration behind “Packs of Land” came from Kyrgyzstan yurts. These “bundlings” aren’t permanent, they are made from nature surrounding them – such as animal hair for the felt they make use of and pillars from tree rods- they are therefore like a layered piece of land, standing within nature; and through their open dome (Tjundjuk), they connect the sky to the ground, and can be moved as one with the people who made them.  

Artist Mary Sherman contemplates the imagery of American nomads, and by combining hobo bindles with pictures of the Kyrgyz yurts shot from the inside out, her work echoes the nomadic traveler’s state of mind.

In his video artworks, the artist Jorge Rojas performs as Chac Mool, a character who acts as a medium for the gods, somewhere between the natural and the supernatural. Through their video performance, the artist reexamined the interrelation of one’s immigrant identity to the American land and invited Taiwanese performers to recreate the live performance of Chac Mool.

In parallel, artist Vanessa Greene also responds to nomadism through the lens of ethnicity. Following her African American father serving in the military, her family often relocated from one military base to another. She uses photography and writing to reference this familial background, and its constant state of relocation, as she considers how this experience and personal identity relate to nomadism.

Shaarbek Amankul explores the environmental, spiritual, and cultural challenges faced by nomads as they experience a rapidly modernizing society, drawing inspiration from the Kyrgyz nomadic way of life, using various media, bones, video, books, to merge Manas, the oral epic poems, with the different themes of contemporary art, nomadism, and shamanism.

Janarbek Saparbek Tegin’s photography presents architectural elements of yurts. The artworks reflect the worldview of nomads, who carry their door as they travel, build a dome in the steppe, and doing so, recreate a world where they go. The intricate details of a yurt symbolize various facets of one’s “existence”, the personal universe of each nomad. 

Adding to this, the yurts demarcate the private from everything else, drawing a boundary at the rain, the wind, the animals, and the public gaze. The architect Weiting Zhang designed the space and routing of the exhibition, deconstructing the yurt into curved panels, and turning their felt into suspended handmade papers, which therefore delimited many intimate spaces. Within the greater landscape, the yurt holds onto its universe, and each panel symbolizes a piece of land, personal and unique to each artist.

The artists used the concept of Yurts as the starting point of their work, and through different acts of “packing”, each artist interpreted the ideas and imaginations about their lands in the context of today’s globalization.