In ancient times, a terrible wind blew across the vast steppe connecting Europe to the Far East. The Greek poets called it the Boreal, and believed it lived in a cave somewhere in the Altai Mountains. Beyond the great wind – in the country of Hyperborea – there was to be found a perfect land where the sun always shines; a place known for its priests and healers like Abaris; who lived in a place where according to the poet Pindar, “…neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed,” and where the Hyperborean race live, “in their sacred blood; far from labor and battle…” (Pindar, Tenth Pythian Ode).
The nomadic communities that survive in places like the Mongolian Taïga today are the descendants of the legendary Hyperboreans; the enlightened race that lived beyond the great wind. Mongol nomads still preserve a vision of life which we in the West still associate with the Golden Race. Perpetual movement on the open range and the proximity to animals, both domestic and in the wild, seems to impart on their kind a certain immunity from degeneration – a certain spiritual wisdom, which may appear incompatible, even abhorrent to the values of sedentary civilization, and which today remains a heroic anachronism, alien to our notions of time and history.
In these ethnographic dreamscapes inhabited by reindeer, bear, horses, eagles and wolves, humans no longer occupy the center of the image. They are just one element floating across the scene. In fact, without the animal companion life would not be possible and man would appear lost.
The essence of Mongolia’s Taïga is a spiritual culture that binds animals to man; it is a place that is bound up with talking beasts and the voices of ancestors, a place that awakens a sense of healing and well-being, yet something utterly contrary to the laws of civilized men. These iconic compositions harken back to an early phase of human consciousness, a time where animal-spirits escorted man between physical and metaphysical barriers, towards other realms.
EXPOSITION
Taïga, au delà du Grand Vent
du 7 février au 12 mars, 2015
Espace Keller
11, rue Keller
75011 Paris
France
http://www.espacekeller.com
Site : http://hamidsardarphoto.com
