Exhibition

Namuun Batbileg | MeWe | Jan 26 – Feb 6, 2019

by Jean-Jacques de Dardel

Ambassador of Switzerland to Mongolia

Namuun Batbileg is the first laureate of the Swiss Ambassador’s Art Prize created to acknowledge and support the lively Mongolian arts scene. This new Prize also aims to profile Switzerland’s commitment to enhanced and diversified relations with the Republic of Mongolia. Because beyond political ties and meetings, trade and development cooperation, wider cultural relations bind people and hearts through positive emotions and meaningful exchanges, thus cementing lasting bonds of friendship.

After a thorough examination of dozens of quality and well documented applications, the bynational jury selected Namuun Batbileg in the spring of 2018. A video interview with the finalists ensued, but I first met the laureate in person shortly before Naadam, when I handed over the certificate distinguishing her as the winner of the contest in a ceremony staged at the Art Space  976 in Ulaanbaatar in early July. It was a rewarding pleasure to discover a warm, elegantly reserved but shining personality. She was visibly rejoicing at the thought of moving to Switzerland for her residency at the Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD), a branch of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland, one of the most renowned European Art Schools whose aura reverberates around the globe. Not that this were to be her first discovery of the world beyond the open steppes of her home country: Namuun has already travelled rather extensively in Brazil, she held exhibitions in Bulgaria, and has earned early recognition as a promising, talented and multi-faceted visual artist.

And so, over a few fall and winter months at the end of last year, Namuun has expanded her horizons further by studying at the HEAD. She interacted with a very multinational crowd of students and professors, she held an exhibition attended by none other than the Mongolian president Khaltmaagiin Battulga and she generously donated many of her works to her country’s Embassy for further exhibitions. It is up to her to share her thoughts and impressions about her stay, the many encounters, the teachings and influences, the learning and introspections, the new impetus gained for novel creativity and experimentation. But it seems obvious to the eye of the observer that she has indeed widened and deepened her grasp on the art of photography. Her gaze at reality, her approach to human figures in their wider natural context, her comprehension of forms and colors have reached new heights. More than ever she looks beyond, searching for different layers of meaning, hidden or deceptively apparent. Her camera now acts as a paint brush, the line is blurred between the figurative and the conceptual, the human form lapses into spirituality. Namuun sails away from the shores of the quickly sighted, the immediate, away from the defined contours of the apparent. Be she surrounded by the majesty and visual symphony of the Geneva lake setting and the skyline of the Alps, she chooses to refrain from enhancing her compositions with grandiose backgrounds. Much rather, she delves into the complexities of reflections on shimmering waters, the cold silence of mist and heavy skies, the blur caused by inner pulsations and the residuum of light as her  focus shifts from body to thought. The viewer of her compositions is brought to reminiscences of Claude Monet’s Nymphéas or David Hockney’s shrill water colors, perhaps John Armleder’s glittering drippings, before being led to loftier levels of intellectualism, where abstraction meets transcendentalism in a mental voyage to the roots of Mongolian culture.

Namuun Batbileg defines her concept as Emotional Balance. Indeed an approach based on emotions left to flourish, be they uplifting or anxious, before being funneled into a new sense for a deeper meaning. And as feelings stirred by the vision of her creations linger on, there remains an almost tangible sense of a true addition to Mongolian-Swiss relations.