Five Heads (Tavan Tolgoi)

Art, Anthropology and Mongol Futurism

HERMIONE SPRIGGS (ED.)

What does the future look like, or feel like, from the perspective of a yak in the coal-mining district of Khovd? From the perspective a Mongolian root extracted, illegally traded, and sold internationally as a pharmaceutical product? Or from that of the toolkit of an urban shaman securing economic futures for professional women in Ulaanbaatar?

Five Heads (Tavan Tolgoi): Art, Anthropology and Mongol Futurism brings together the work of five anthropologists and five artists/collectives researching and responding to the dramatic rise and fall of Mongolia’s mineral economy. Launched in tandem with the eponymous exhibition at greengrassi and Corvi-Mora in London, the publication features visual documentation of multiple art-anthropology exchange processes, ethnographic texts, and further written contributions that introduce contemporary Mongolia as a dynamic site for conceptual and creative experimentation.

Contributions by BAATARZORIG BATJARGAL & NOMIN BOLD, LAUREN BONILLA, BUMOCHIR DULAM, REBECCA EMPSON, RICHARD D.G. IRVINE, SIMON O'SULLIVAN, YURI PATTISON, REBEKAH PLUECKHAHN, DOLGOR SER OD & MARC SCHMITZ, HERMIONE SPRIGGS, DEBORAH TCHOUDJINOFF, TSENDPUREV TSEGMID, URANCHIMEG TSULTEM, HEDWIG WATERS, TUGULDUR YONDONJAMTS

Five Heads is part of Emerging Subjects of the New Economy, a project funded by the European Research Council and led by Dr. Rebecca Empson in the Department of Anthropology, University College London.

published by Sternberg Press
2018, 136 pages, 13,5 x 20 cm