The Kathmandu Triennial

Kathmandu’s infrastructure projects added to the city’s usual level of dust, noise, traffic and commotion. The triennial was spread between three main locations throughout the city. One could have spent an hour in a cab to go two miles, or have walked and finished spattered in mud. Additionally, the show suffered its share of miscommunication, poor organization, and last-minute cancellations (it was slightly worse than your average first-time biennial). This made the Kathmandu Triennial a relatively difficult exhibition to visit. But Kathmandu, even after the earthquake, has a lot of amazing sites and Philippe Van Cauteren, the head curator, created a triennial which was thoroughly worth seeing.

The first Kathmandu Triennial was organized around the theme of the city (the city as studio, in fact). And though the idea of another biennial or triennial with the city as its theme might properly elicit a yawn, the Kathmandu Triennial did not fit into this endless series of shows about the city and globalization. The Triennial resonated with an earlier moment of modernism. In the wake of the 2015 earthquake, Kathmandu had become a large worksite, infrastructure projects dominated the city. The façade of my hotel had been removed, the hotel was being pushed back in order to widen the street. There was a feeling of Haussmannization in the air. And so it seemed appropriate that this particular triennial should resonate with an earlier moment in the history of modernism, allowing the transient, the ephemeral, the particular and the private to pair with the timeless and the universal. The show placed emphasis on the individual moving about the city. While resonating with this earlier form of modernism, it was in no way reducible to it. It was a contemporary return steeped in Nepalese culture.

The show’s choice to pair Song Dong’s Mandala City of Eating, a mandala made of food and consumed at the show’s opening, with a beautiful colored sand Mandala created over the first week of the show by the Rigon Tashi Cheoling Monks, and destroyed at the triennial’s closing, was a graceful gesture, not only highlighting the show’s commitment to the ephemeral and the transitory, but also pointing to the show’s focus on destruction, echoing the devastation of the 2015 earthquake. Ang Tsherin Sherpa’s work, Wish-Fulfilling Tree, a seven-tiered, handmade copper repoussé mandala, created in collaboration with local Nepalese craftsmen, was supported by broken household objects and rubble from the earthquake. Viewers threw five-rupee pieces onto the work; if they lodged in the altar, it brought luck. Ciprian Muresan’s Untitled project also resonated with the earthquake’s destruction. A model of the city of Bucharest, it was placed at the entrance of the second floor of the Nepal Art Counsel. At the opening, to get to the show, viewers had to walk on the model. Unfortunately, I only saw the project after its destruction, but the ruins were beautiful enough.

Francis Alÿs’s Paradox of Praxis Making Something Out of Nothing (click to see the video online) is a canonical work of contemporary art from 1997. Including it in the Kathmandu Triennial demonstrated the show’s dedication to the ephemeral, but also to its interest in the individual’s experience of moving through the city. In the video, Alÿs pushes a large block of ice through Mexico City. Over time, the block melts into nothing. Along with this, Alÿs included a minor work created for the show that tracked his movement through Kathmandu. Alÿs’s and Song’s participation in the show were examples of the generous gestures that a number of important international artists made for the triennial.

Two other works that emphasized movement in the city were Alice Fox’s Taxi Guff Gaff KTM and Monali Meher’s performance, which started in the Patan Museum and ended with her moving through the narrow streets of Patan. Taxi Guff Gaff KTM invited 12 artists, writers, and thinkers to discuss the nature of the city. They were divided into four different taxis, driven through Kathmandu Valley during the monsoon, and asked to draw during the journey. Their beautiful images were included in the show. (Click for a video about the project). Meher’s performance started with a variety of household objects and small pieces of clothing (hats and scarves) spread across one of the courtyards of the Patan Museum (one of the triennial’s main locations). Long strands of red yarn were attached to each item. Crowding around Meher, the audience attached these objects, one by one, to her body: her arms, legs, around her neck and waist. A pail dragged behind her as she left the museum and moved through the tight streets around Patan Square with her audience trailing. Occasionally, she stopped to cut a string and give an object to a passerby. Sometimes it went to people on the street, children, strollers, storekeepers, other local inhabitants, and sometimes to her art audience. I got a dhaka topi. Our long procession ended when the objects were gone. The performance was over.

One of Kathmandu’s important events each year is the Rato Machindranath Chariot festival where a chariot, almost 50 feet in height, is pulled through the streets of Patan. Bidharaka KC’s produced a similarly sized, new version of the Chariot for the Kathmandu Triennial, connecting the show’s focus on moving through the city with its interest in the individual’s connection with a larger reality. Because of its size, the new chariot was divided section by section through the Nepal Art Counsel building. It connected all of the levels of the exhibition space. At the top, an antenna pointed out, as though it were meant to connect with, to broadcast out to the universe.

Javier Téllez’s video, Letter on the Blind, for Use of Those Who See also pointed to the individual’s connection to a larger reality. It was not only based on Dennis Diderot’s essay of the same name, but also a parable which originated in the Indian subcontinent, making it especially appropriate for a show in this part of the world. The original parable told the story of blind people touching different parts of an elephant and concluding that the elephant was a snake, a tree, or a wall. The parable was about the blind’s inability to make sense of a whole elephant, blindness functioning as a metaphor for the limits of human knowledge. Following Diderot, Téllez seems to wonder whether the blind might understand the world differently than the sighted. His video asked six blind people to touch an elephant. Their experience of the elephant was significantly different from the parable. A number of images in Ronny Delrue and Sanjeev Maharjan’s collaboration, Dialogue Depth, moved from the individual and the personal to the larger world and then to the cosmos. A series of seemingly personal photographs had circles of different sizes removed from each. These circles were used to create images that seemed to represent the cosmos, suggesting that it was understandable as a collection of our personal experiences.

At one of the triennial’s associated shows, Mekh Limbu had a related series of images with a global twist. Throughout Limbu’s childhood, his father, like so many Nepalese, in order to support his family, worked construction, building houses in Qatar. Limbu created a series of photos of the houses that his father built, matched with texts that explained what politically or historically was happening in Nepal at that moment. This connected his father’s experiences to larger histories, the history of Nepal, and also to the migration created by our global economic system.

This tendency to expand in order to encompass everything could be seen in Bart Lodewijks’s high modern line drawings. Lodewijks works on the edge of the public and the private, drawing with chalk on private homes. He gets a resident’s permission to draw on their house, but because his drawings constantly expand, he is shortly forced to get their neighbor’s permission, also. The drawing spreads, eventually encompassing the whole neighborhood. Here, an interesting tension exists between the way that his work builds community but also has the potential to pressure people into communities they do not wish to be a part of. This perceptive work manifests the hidden aggressiveness of modernism, with its one-size-fits-all universalism, by exerting subtle pressures on inhabitants, forcing them to conform, to permit Lodewijks’s drawing to cover their houses or, if not, to exist as outsiders in their own neighborhoods. Like modernism, it seems to take the position that it knows what is best for everyone. If the Kathmandu Triennial is a return to an earlier form of western modernism, it is a return that, as opposed to blinding itself to modernism’s aggressiveness, uses work like Lodewijks’s to tease out its implications.

In similar ways, Carole Vanderlinden’s works, which referred back to a utopian form of modernism, used both its image and its support to address the nature of modernism. Her images were reminiscent of the early paintings of Alexander Rodchenko. But as opposed to simply being utopian, her paintings challenged their own modernism by engaging their supports. They were painted on found, decrepit wood panels, rich with their own histories. This disrupted the idea that Vanderlinden’s paintings were built on neutral ground, the product of some sort of tabula rasa. Her works forced the uneasy coexistence of utopian visions with the real-world history of their supports, addressing modernism’s inability to engage its own site.

 

In spite of this, the triennial did address Kathmandu as a site in a number of ways. Shilpa Gupta’s Map Tracing #3 and Map Tracing #4 used copper wire to create the outlines of both India and Nepal. Bent and leaning against the wall, these borders seemed weightless and immaterial, pointing to the arbitrary and imaginary quality of “nations.” Manish Lal Shrestha’s Project 1336 transformed the exhibition space into a factory producing knitted rope. The rope pooled in the space, and children played with and in it. By the end of the exhibition, the factory plans to have produced 1336 meters of rope, corresponding to the elevation of Kathmandu, with the rope scheduled to be carried in a procession through the streets of the city.

One of the remarkable things about the Kathmandu Triennial was the number of renowned artists who sent important works and spent substantial amounts of time in the city. I have already mentioned Song, Alÿs, and Téllez, but there were others, including Nedko Solakov, Kadar Atta, and Cai Guo-Qiang. Their generosity was especially notable because the triennial has not yet become prestigious and to these artists its budget must have seemed modest. Their generosity seemed to express their sincere desire to help heal the city in the wake of the 2015 earthquake. Healing also sometimes functioned as one of the show’s themes.

Solakov’s very personal work showed the rituals that he uses to alleviate certain irrational fears. Each morning the artist touches with his thumb different spots on an object, a strange sort of altar that looks a little like a monstrously irrational polyptych, with variously sized panels folding out in all directions, and knotty webs of string sprawled across it. The center panel seems to show an image of the artist with his back towards us, reaching out to numbered, cartoonish representations of his fears. Touching each different number assuages a different fear, ranging from his fears of AIDS, blindness, snakes, and high voltage, to his fear of Others. For the triennial, Solakov photographed this very personal object, had the photograph mounted on a wall, and had handwritten descriptions of its use, as well as which number stood for which fear, written above and around the photograph. The work had the tenderness of a close friend who, as opposed to prescribing a particular cure, helps us deal with our infirmities by acknowledging his own.

 Atta had a beautiful essay film called Reflecting Memory. The film told the story of trauma and the healing that allows people to move on. Atta is one of the most important contemporary artists and his film Reflecting Memory is one of his best works. It was originally shown at the Pompidou Center in the show that accompanied his receiving the Prix Marcel Duchamp. Like many of his films, it was driven by his interviews with experts. But Reflecting Memory told more of the story with images and used powerful visual metaphors. The film started with people who had lost limbs in traumatic ways, and the phantom pain that often accompanies such injuries. Atta covered their missing limbs with a mirror, approximating the person’s image before their accident, showing them whole. This type of image ran through the film in many different ways. By the end, it had allowed Atta to visually represent the idea of healing. He showed what it meant for people to be able to move on.

 Cai’s performance at the triennial was a good example of the generosity of some of the show’s major artists. He is famous for spectacular firework performances built on the largest scale with the most advanced technologies; think of the display he built for the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Yet, knowing that he would not be able to work at his usual scale, use advanced technology, or even use gunpowder, Cai agreed to create a work for the Kathmandu Triennial. With the help of the Nepalese Army, using plastic explosives, he had hoped to recreate the success he had with his firework performance, Ladder to the Sky, by creating a firework display that formed a rope bridge. When this did not work, Cai agreed to show a film about his life and work, and to engage in a conversation with the show’s curator, Philippe Van Cauteren. With the immense charm art stars can often muster, Cai acted out the firework performance he had planned. Seeing his fireworks would have been great. His performance was amazing. In spite of the failure of his project, he was able to express an affection for Kathmandu and Nepal and his desire to see the country heal.

This, then, was the Kathmandu Triennial’s greatest strength. It was peopled by artists and curators who passionately wanted to do what they could for the city. These acts of love created a powerful show that captured this moment, this city flooded by so many development projects. But occasionally one found oneself longing for a less partisan treatment of the city’s problems, a vision of the way forward less foreclosed by the metaphor of healing, and a greater acknowledgement of the costs that development projects impose, for example, on the city’s already degraded rivers that are so important to Nepalese culture and tradition. These, though, seem more appropriate as a proposal for the next Kathmandu Triennial than a criticism of this one.

© Vincent Pruden