MONGOLIA 360°

Perspectives in Land Art. The new challenges we face mean we're going to have to rethink our connections to the planet and to each other. When it comes to creating a new space for building new relationships, the arts are uniquely powerful. Land Art is arising as a new kind of art space: a virtual, discontinuous, shape-shifting terrain, more conceptual than architectural, with a reach that has already become global in scope.

Questions like Sustainability, the perspective of ecology and a new vision of diversity require a creative understanding beside the common white cube art spaces where the arts become more and more condensed by economical force. In order to develop a new chapter in the Land Art tradition since the beginning in the American West in the late 60^th and following the nomadic idea of the Walking Museum - the Land Art Biennial in Mongolia was founded to be located in various locations of Mongolia. The Biennial is a forum in search of contemporary definitions of what Land Art can reveal about   “today’s questions”. In order to open a free space of artistic interaction they decided not to restrict the definition of land art by any presets.

 With LAM 360°  the concept for the 1^st international Land Art Biennial  was hosted in the Gobi desert in August 2010 .

 As is common for organic processes, the Land Art Mongolia project took years to coalesce. Inspired by a Land Art Symposium in the Gobi Village Bor Undur in 2006 the concept of a collaborative land-art exhibition series was first envisioned by the Mongolian Artists Dagvadorj Sereeterj and the Berlin based Artist Marc Schmitz. In early meetings, members of the Society discussed a  simpler effort to facilitate a partnership between the team in Berlin (KUNSTFORUM BERLIN) and one of Ulaanbaatar  major art institutions: the UMA (Union of Mongolian Artists).

 In June 2009, when Puntsag Tsegmid , executive director of DUBTSUN, stepped in to take over the practical coordination in Mongolia, and an international team joined the Land Art committee with the tasks of  curating, fundraising,  marketing, and much of the program development directed by Marc Schmitz. Since 2012 the organization MNG360° is an official registered NGO in Mongolia with the aim to promote Land Art and the dialog of Art & Politics. Within the rhythm of a Biennial the festival is carried out every 2 years (2014/2016..) at different locations and held under various thematic issues.