In his films, installations, and performances, Tenzin Phuntsog considers issues related to the Tibetan diaspora, exile and displacement, as well as the entanglements between land and language. He draws from his own biography as a TibetanAmerican whose attempts to visit Tibet have been forestalled and captures the longings of his family, the forms of their memories, and the strategies they adopt to deal with absence as a means of reconciling the impossibility of Tibetan bodies inhabiting their own homeland. In Pure Land, Phuntsog focuses on the affective and cultural significance of the landscape in diasporic experience. The film depicts a son’s efforts to capture remote landscapes in the United States in search of a displaced recreation of the scenery of his mother’s Tibetan homeland. In revealing the exchanges between these figures, Phuntsog explores notions of memory and imagination in the construction of languages and landscapes beyond distinctions of borders or territories. This work was filmed on ancestral lands of the Blackfeet Tribe in Montana, implicitly acknowledging hundreds of years of Native genocide and resistance.
