Ovoo: Timelessness, 2022

The Buryad-Mongol tradition includes using Ovoos as monuments to represent the sacredness of the land. I have found strength in this metaphor to express my deep emotional connection to the ancestral home. My family's oral histories and photographic archives have provided memories contributing to my interpretation of Buryat history. Through a photo book format, I present a final work, including anthropological photographs of Siberians from a Russian ethnographic museum, pictures of my family members, their diary entries, and a contemporary photographic series I created in response.

Documentation of the exhibition installation at LCC Ma photography graduation show, November 2022

Photo: David Goodkin.

 In memory of my great grand father - Sodnom Dorzhi (1922-2011)

“Sodnom Dorzhi's childhood was joyful. In 1931, Soviet Collectivisation began: there was one cow left, then hunger came, and we did not have time to think about photography, only how to survive. The Badma family went out of collectivization with losses; a very beautiful and intelligent sister, Cirilla, passed away, born in 1917. The mother, Khandama Tsyrenova, found it increasingly hard to cope with the loss of her only daughter. This picture was taken in the year of the death of my beloved sister, taken in the village of Shiringe on August 13, 1937”.

- Sodnom Dorzhi diary, 1990s

Ovoo book selected pages: