Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Film

Born 1991 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Lives in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Bringing together short sequences of video materials taken from the National Archives of Mongolia, Zulaa Urchuud’s 2021 black-and-white film Nuudelch Khand’laga’ (Nomadtitude) explores nomadic peoples’ changing relationship to the land and production with the onset of urbanization in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, in the early twentieth century. The English title of the work collapses the words “nomad” and “attitude,” while the film’s montage technique recalls the Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s as well as the materialist approaches of filmmakers associated with structuralism in the 1960s and the 1970s. Consistent with Urchuud’s broader practice, Nuudelch Khand’laga’ offers a layered, nonlinear portrayal of Mongolian peoples and cultures, achieved through formal manipulation of sound and moving images. The film rapidly alternates between varied archival video clips—including distant views of railroads and bridges, images of forests and lakes, and scenes of men in cars and airplanes—disrupting the uniformity of a single historical narrative and offering instead a collage that reflects the diverse facets of Mongolia’s modernity.