WP_1.4
Ripped out Tongues, Spheres of Forced Forgetting
Nomin Zezegmaa
30.4 - 9.5.2021
Beginning September, 2020, Southern Mongolians are threatened with cultural genocide following the Chinese Central Government's aggressive policy of wiping out Mongolian-language eduction.
The scope of the campaign has extended far beyond converting the medium of instruction from Mongolian to Chinese. Government mouthpieces, including the Inner Mongolia Radio and Television Station, have been ordered to replace Mongolian content with Chinese cultural programs in order to promote a 'strong sense of Chinese national identity common identity! One of the campaign's official slogans, 'Learn Chinese and become a civilized person, has been used to publicly promote Chinese supremacy over the Mongolian language, culture, and iden-tity. In schools, Mongolian students are subjected to military training and propagandist activities. Mongolian college students are forced to wear Mao-style uniforms and sing communist 'red' songs to extol the greatness of China.!*
Nomin Zezegmaa's Ripped our Tongues and Spheres of Forced Forgetting reacts to this human rights crisis and the pain of disconnecting from one's mpther tongue
Zezegmaa's three-layered, site specific work has a painful focus on involuntarily disconnectedness and (non)relationality to collective heritage: Mongol bichig, the classical writing system and language of ethnic groups of the Greater Mongolian Nation. Ripped out Tongues investigates and gives account to the political, territorial struggles and how suppression forms intergenerational tragic realities, nevertheless imbued with resilience and a reconstruction of collective histories, tongues, and narratives.
If within the shamanic pantheon one were to draw a spectrum of memories, identity and history embedded within the spirit world-and origin spirits (sahius) emphasize the amalgamation of the hyperpo-tentiality of re-constructing exactly those - then uheer spirits embody the absolute opposite.
Uheer is a lost, damned soul, whose identity, origin (ug garval), genealogy and memories can never be reconstructed. Its soul is caught in eternal limbo.
The agonizing reality of uheer spirits stem from state violence during the Stalinist Great Purge (ИхХэлмэгдэл), the victims of these massacres were thrown into unmarked mass burials, thus never having received proper burial rituals.
The souls of people who have lost their lives in the mass murders wander aimlessly in agony and fury, forgotten who they once were.
The uheer articulates a deeply tragic reality, of memories forever lost, torn apart and destroyed, perhaps even, the memories of having forgotten may be lost too-just like when the tongues of an entire generation is ripped out.
If we forget the history of our tongues, peoples and ancestors, uvug deedes, if we lose the last sanctuary of our collective heritage, our tongues and souls will become just like an uheer. Irreversibly lost and forgotten in the immaterial dark realm of amne-sia-forgetting that we have forgotten.
#SAVETHEMONGOLIANLANGUAGE
*This information has been taken from the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Centre – currently the only resource gathering and providing information regarding the Southern Mongolian human rights crisis. Read the full article here.
The scope of the campaign has extended far beyond converting the medium of instruction from Mongolian to Chinese. Government mouthpieces, including the Inner Mongolia Radio and Television Station, have been ordered to replace Mongolian content with Chinese cultural programs in order to promote a 'strong sense of Chinese national identity common identity! One of the campaign's official slogans, 'Learn Chinese and become a civilized person, has been used to publicly promote Chinese supremacy over the Mongolian language, culture, and iden-tity. In schools, Mongolian students are subjected to military training and propagandist activities. Mongolian college students are forced to wear Mao-style uniforms and sing communist 'red' songs to extol the greatness of China.!*
Nomin Zezegmaa's Ripped our Tongues and Spheres of Forced Forgetting reacts to this human rights crisis and the pain of disconnecting from one's mpther tongue
Zezegmaa's three-layered, site specific work has a painful focus on involuntarily disconnectedness and (non)relationality to collective heritage: Mongol bichig, the classical writing system and language of ethnic groups of the Greater Mongolian Nation. Ripped out Tongues investigates and gives account to the political, territorial struggles and how suppression forms intergenerational tragic realities, nevertheless imbued with resilience and a reconstruction of collective histories, tongues, and narratives.
If within the shamanic pantheon one were to draw a spectrum of memories, identity and history embedded within the spirit world-and origin spirits (sahius) emphasize the amalgamation of the hyperpo-tentiality of re-constructing exactly those - then uheer spirits embody the absolute opposite.
Uheer is a lost, damned soul, whose identity, origin (ug garval), genealogy and memories can never be reconstructed. Its soul is caught in eternal limbo.
The agonizing reality of uheer spirits stem from state violence during the Stalinist Great Purge (ИхХэлмэгдэл), the victims of these massacres were thrown into unmarked mass burials, thus never having received proper burial rituals.
The souls of people who have lost their lives in the mass murders wander aimlessly in agony and fury, forgotten who they once were.
The uheer articulates a deeply tragic reality, of memories forever lost, torn apart and destroyed, perhaps even, the memories of having forgotten may be lost too-just like when the tongues of an entire generation is ripped out.
If we forget the history of our tongues, peoples and ancestors, uvug deedes, if we lose the last sanctuary of our collective heritage, our tongues and souls will become just like an uheer. Irreversibly lost and forgotten in the immaterial dark realm of amne-sia-forgetting that we have forgotten.
#SAVETHEMONGOLIANLANGUAGE
*This information has been taken from the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Centre – currently the only resource gathering and providing information regarding the Southern Mongolian human rights crisis. Read the full article here.
Letter to foreign ministries declaring Mongolia's independence during the Mongolian Revolution of 1911.
Nomin Zezegmaa is a Berlin-based artist, designer, researcher and writer of Mongolian heritage. Mongol shamanism, its history, violent suppression during Stalin’s Great Terror, and its direct link to the late twentieth century diasporic movement of Mongolians, are pivotal themes in her current research trajectory with a focus on collective history-making through the condensation of singular, individual lived, experienced, and embodied accounts of diasporic movements. Zezegmaa’s often sculptural and tactile works find fluid expression in an amorphous multiplicity of medium and material, where applied and unapplied arts meet on equal ground — with the urgency to blur and diffuse the rigid borders and boundaries between art, design, crafts and histories.