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As I Fall Asleep to My Great Aunt’s Fable of a Herder Boy
work by Nomka Enkhee
October 24—February 9, 2025
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.
We acknowledge that in Milwaukee we live and work on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee homelands along the southwest shores of Michigami, part of North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee, and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida, and Mohican nations remain present.
We further acknowledge the grave evil colonialism introduced to these lands through genocide as well as slavery, and also via racist and xenophobic beliefs, laws, and practices that continue to inflict harm upon Black, brown, and Indigenous lives. We honor those who have lived—and do live, now—at these intersections of identity and experience, and are committed to the active dismantling of white supremacy.
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