As I Fall Asleep to My Great Aunt’s Fable of a Herder Boy, work by Nomka Enkhee

On View: October 25, 2024–February 9, 2025

Reception and Artist Talk: Sat. Nov. 2 | 5–8 pm CDT

What is a memory?

What is a gesture?

What is a tale?

What is remembering?

What is drawing?

What is a line?

What is a stick?

What is a pause?

What is listening?

What is a faraway drift?

What is forgetting?

What is comfort?

What is discomfort?

What is never forgetting?

These are a few thoughts and questions cemented in the artist Nomka Enkhee’s mind, whether asleep or awake or neither. Divulging secrets and memories in this exhibition, she reveals tales, gossip, dreams, and stagnancies revolving memory. Drawing from her childhood in Mongolia, she seeks redemption and freedom, with an obsessive recounting of oral history racing through her mind, especially at night. Through drawing and painting, she excavates memory into translated artifacts on paper. Closing her eyes she sees the bluest sky and the vastest mountains, and listening closely, she can hear the stories again.

Nomka Enkhee is an artist working in sculpture, drawing, text, and performance. She explores structures of migration through material, repetition, and language. Her practice involves collecting domestic artifacts and reconfiguring them into sculptures that speak to themes of loss and gain, heartbreak, and luck. Drawing and text serve the artist as an anchor for language and an interrogation of translation rooted in ancestral oral traditions. In 2022, she founded Pferde Books, further exploring drawing, text, and translation through the form of publishing and distribution.

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