Tenzin Phuntsog: GYATSO

The Edith-Russ-Haus is pleased to present the three-channel video installation titled GYATSO by Tenzin Phuntsog in the Pulverturm (Powder Tower), which belongs to the former castle wall of Oldenburg and is the only remaining building of the fortifications of the city. Its history goes back to 1529, when Count Anton I (1505–1573) renewed the city’s military facilities. Since 1996, the Pulverturm has been used for cultural purposes during the summer months.

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 realized the project in the framework of the Media Art grant 2023 in the Edith-Russ-Haus by the Stiftung Niedersachsen.

Opening hours: Friday, 2–6pm; Saturday and Sunday, 11am–6pm