By Kurchi Dasgupta
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Vajravahana by Asha Dangol
One more biennale or triennale is likely to elicit little excitement; but when one of the world’s youngest republics – Nepal – launches one of South Asia’s biggest non-profit art events, with an agenda as relevant and pressing as climate change and its human impact, it’s time to sit up and take notice! On the sunny morning of 25 November, the Kathmandu International Art Festival kicked off – even as the Prime Minister reneged on his commitment to formally inaugurate the event and Nepal’s political leaders huddled together, trying to find a way out of a political impasse. The country has been without a government for the past six months, and a constitution is yet to be drawn up.
As I took my seat in the in the ballroom of the grand Yak and Yeti Hotel in a room full of international and local art practitioners, curators, critics, environmentalists, ministers and ambassadors, the Festival Director Sangeeta Thapa came on stage to welcome us to ‘Earth Body Mind’, the second edition of Kathmandu International Art Festival, a new triennale and the largest art event ever to be held in Nepal. A brief retelling of her efforts to materialize an art festival of this scale in the country was enough to convince us of her travails. Though Nepal has contributed less than most other nations towards climate degradation, as Thapa pointed out, it is one of the first countries to be adversely affected because of its Himalayan location – millions are already suffering from changing weather patterns and the threat of ‘glacial lake outburst floods’ (GLOFs) is reaching a point of inevitability. Driven by people’s concern and a hope to bring about policy changes in the yet-to-be written Constitution, Thapa and her team of co-ordinators, including Sharareh Bajracharya and Nischal Oli, took up the challenge of turning contemporary art into a tool for social awareness and change. Thapa’s Siddhartha Art Foundation designed KIAF as an educational event to bring together a heady mix of international and local contemporary artists and environmentalists. The widely attended symposium scheduled alongside the exhibition was proof enough of that commitment. Currently spread across 16 venues, works by artists from 31 countries have transformed Kathmandu – the Nepalese capital – into a brilliant kaleidoscope of visionary ideas, critical negotiations and most importantly, great art.
I head straight for Nepal Art Council, the country’s official art gallery. The ground floor is resplendent with Jyoti Duwadi’s site-specific Shades of Seeds– mounds of brightly coloured seeds on a cracked mud floor reminding us of threats posed by monoculture, genetic mutation and the scarcity of water resources in an increasingly fragile natural balance.
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Jyoti Duwadi ‘Shades of Seeds’
In sharp formal contrast is Mahbubur Rahman’s video–cum–kinetic installation Repeatedly Repetition . The piece grapples with Bangladesh’s realities through interplaying ideas of body and power, movement and stasis, time and structure – strangely ominous and disturbing in context of Nepal’s political reality. Taking the stairs to the second floor, I am greeted by Sarawut Chutiwongpeti’s white room of white-washed rubbish retrieved from Mt Everest, and stacked on flowering spikes against a luminous ball of light. Wishes, Lies and Dreams (2012) reflects the separations and contiguities between energy, form and time while warning us against our reckless materialism. Later, another work shown at the other end of the city reminded me of the same – Meena Kayastha’s tentacle-sprouting plaster faces, Evolving Consciousness (2012) that pay ‘homage to Mother Nature’. Like Sarawut, Kayastha re-energizes scavenged junk.
My next encounter is with Vibha Galhotra’s preoccupation with the dying river Yamuna in Delhi, and the predicament of the communities living along its banks, eponymously called Sediment (2012). Sediment collected from the river is splashed across large canvases, salvaged tires, the printed text of the Indian national anthem. The medium itself is message enough. In fact, the perils simultaneously faced and posed by rivers, oceans, water bodies, or water itself weaves the festival together in unforeseen ways. Brazilian Priscilla De Carvalho’s mural-cum-installation of a teeming metropolis flooded by the ocean and garbage In the Midst of Garbage Sunlight Persists (2012) touch upon raw nerves, as does Australia’s Michelle Hall’s life-size paper boats, poignantly titled We May End up in the Same Boat .
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Michelle Hall ‘We May End Up in the Same Boat’
On a more meditative note, her compatriot Noelene Lucas’s video of rivers across the world, ranging from the Niagra to the Thai Chao Phraya (Atlas of Water – Rivers , 2012); Mili Pradhan’s recordings of a dying Bagmati in Float, and Sheelasha Rajbhandari’s remapping of the nearly extinct Tukucha in Ghost River – both rivers of the Kathmandu Valley. The waterfront of Karachi is the point of contact for Pakistan’s Yasir Hussain’s video Neuro that goes on to facilitate the interaction between Pakistani fishing communities and Nepali farmers in an internet interaction called Bio during the festival itself and Nepal’s own Sadish Dhakal’s Jamara Might Not Exist is a complex representation of lake Tsho Rolpa’s enhancement in size and volume over the past 60 years, which finds visual correspondence in steadily increasing numbers of earthen pots bearing sprouting barley seeds, better known as the traditional jamara – all of which is contextualized by events in world history – think Sputnik or Berlin Wall! On a more conventional note, the German group Blauschimmer created watercolours and drawings on overlapping layers to tackle issues of historicity and documentation of the ocean in The Ocean is Our Future.
Meanwhile, I find the Cambodian Leang Seckong has taken over the Kathmandu Zoo, probably for the first time in its history, to install a majestic water serpent constructed from salvaged polythene bags, which he calls Naga.
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Lean Seckong ‘Naga’
Talking of which brings me to the pseudo-mythical bamboo creature of Michael Campbell and Janis Rahn, who negotiated the spectre of plastic waste through organic structures and hybrid videos. Plastic waste is also a preoccupation of Kirti Kaushal Joshi’s fine installation Sample that references core samples projected from the future and of course, the celebrated Sheba Chhachhi, whose Neelkanth: Poison/Nectar questions the human race’s predilection for material wealth/waste while offering hope in the form of redemption through the myth of blue-throated, unpredictably forbearing Shiva. Since Shiva is also noted for his mood swings – it is also a warning to humankind to watch its step! On a more hybrid note, Probir Gupta’s complex and layered The Rape and the Product (2012) takes plastic, wildlife and the eco-system, memory and gender, consumption and power games on a tailspin to comment on the current urban Indian experience. On the other hand, a similar theme in Mekh Limbu’s paintings come across as much tamer, if accessible. ‘I am left breathless by the immense range,’ says curator Alka Pande in response to the festival. Even rubbish bins find a pride of place in Bulgarian Svetoslav Nedev’s video pieces visualized to the sound of Bach – or his photo stillsBiotope/Biotope II.
Video installations and performances have found a pride of place in KIAF, much to the benefit of the local viewers for whom the moving image and performance are still, and mostly, restricted to the realms of film or theatre. Duwadi’s video installation, in collaboration with DJ Spooky, of melting glaciers projected on liquefying ice blocks in the middle of teeming Nag Bahal in the township of Patan brings the issue of receding glaciers and GLOFs sinisterly close. As I tip-toe across the shopping mall, Metro Park, I stand amazed by the transformation the space has undergone in the hands of Sujan Chitrakar and his team of dedicated students. Here, among other works, Iranian Fereshteh Alamshah’s elegiac videos capture the traumas of war and environmental degradation in Plastic Art and Henna Party.
Not surprisingly, the body confronts itself through a number of entries in ‘Earth Body Mind’. Visual anthropological works by the British/Brazilian grande dame of photography, Maureen Bisilliat offer inexhaustible insights into the lives of tribes along the Xingu river. In counterpoint are Peruvian artist Cecilia Paredes’ painted human forms photographed against wallpaper, each relentless in its effort to retain a semblance of existential authenticity. Her other work, a diaphanous installation created from 18th century Calderon editions, is a similar query into the fragility and resilience of the material.
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Cecilia Paredes
However, Jupiter Pradhan’s incursion comprising wax torsos sprouting burning wicks and strobe lights fall short of furthering the query. Saurganga Darshandhari’s 300 pairs of plaster cast feet strewn across Patan Museum’s central courtyard – Where Am I?– spark resonances, while Suneeta Maharjan’s painting-installation scrutinizes the tropes of earth and the womb.
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Saurganga Darshandhari ‘Where Am I?’
The body is also the focus for Gopal Kalapremi’s ceramic forms, created en site for the KIAF through the tortuous process of raku. On a more extreme note, we have Takehito Shiina from Japan, whose photo series ‘Dawn of the Photosynthesizers’ record the sprouting of vegetation from his own flesh in search of a symbiotic and energy-efficient future. The flesh, somewhat inevitably, has to confront the aspect of torture too – in this case through Nameera Ahmed’s poignant footage on chicken slaughter (Bloody Birds) and the Palestinian Ibrahim Jawabreh’s performance-video. Exuberant performances by the Mongolian group Nomad Wave were insightful and the Dance Butoh performed by the Italian Valeria Germia during a gala dinner took the conversation further in more ways than one!
Rhythms of migration were central to the multi-layered wall pieces of Paula Sengupta, who inscribed the forced versus natural migrations of Himalayan tribes and Brahminy ducks through symbols and icons (Pages from the Gokyo Diary).
Nepal is a land of synchronicities – which is evident in senior Nepali artists Birendra Pratap Singh’s scroll depicting an urge to return to the source, and the very traditional Lok Chitrakar’s lotuses – the flowers are supposed to change colour over time and exposure to pollution and the painting surely deserves the title of a ‘performance’! Asha Dangol’s oxygen masked and multiple-headed deity Vajravahana is a more direct take on the spectre of pollution! As are Hitman Gurung’s body of work focussing on the gas mask and Wolfgang Stiller’s burnt-out matchstick heads – a runaway hit with the viewers! But Pulak’s pith-flower-covered gas mask (Encapsulated-7), Sanjeev Maharjan’s chopped tree trunks (Untitled) or Guezennec’s deliver nasty jolts to complacency.
On a happier note, light and energy found their place too. Enthusiastic passers-by sweated on a chilly November night to produce enough energy to light up a moon – actually a massive white balloon hovering over Nag Bahal. And Gaynor O’Flynn transmuted the sound energy produced by a dozen Buddhist monks chanting a peace prayer into an exhilarating laser show right on the surface of the revered Bouddha Stupa – a memory that will surely stay with each of us for a long time. What also impressed me about this edition of KIAF was the curatorial expertise of people like Dina Bangdel, Rina Lath and Niilofur Farrukh and of course Pande and O’Flynn – rather than regressing into examples that merely set off a curatorial theme, the interplay of artworks set off a new dynamic that open up fresh avenues of thought – hopefully for a better earth!
But my favourite work remains Forest Walk– a soundscape created specially for KIAF by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Sounds of nature and civilization blend with external aural sources in a frightening symphony of peace and violence. It helped me rediscover the backyard of an art institution for one, and also helped me wake up to the enormity of humankind’s atrocities. It is a strong reminder that we need to get our act together fast. Thank you KIAF for bringing the message home. ‘Earth Body Mind’ runs until 21 December.
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Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller ‘Forest Walk’
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