Editorial»
Love and death at Nagarjun
DEC 19 - The occasion was an installation cum performance exhibition displaying the works of some of the extremely talented contemporary artists of Nepal including Sujan Chitrakar, Asmina Ranjit, Mukesh Malla, Laya Mainali, Kalapremi Shrestha, Ramesh Vikal, Sangi Shrestha, Sarita Dongol, Dandpani Upadyaya, Salil Subedi and Chandani among others. The place was Osho Tapovan at Nagarjun hills, a meditation centre constructed in a hilly uneven terrain half hidden among tall, sprawling green trees. As I began my tour of the exhibition on Dec 6, I was greeted by certain motifs or recurring patterns that shaped the overall tonality of the show.
One was the theme of the swings. Swings big and small, hanging from branches or tied to colourful thread followed us all the way as we descended down a stone staircase, crossed the meditation hall and a number of clearings bordered by thick bushes to reach a waterfall at the bottom of the hill. Macharaja Maharjan described his art through a poem, fitting titled “Swings of Nothingness” as we reached the last one of the swings, hanging above a table holding two cups of tea, one of them drunk and emptied, the other untouched, full though cold and useless. While it is inevitable that all swings and oscillations of life will end at the moment of death, those who fail to drink from the cup of life end up as losers, Macharaja explained, this installation is about two people, and about their differing attitudes towards life. While one of them drank from the cup of life, the other forgot to drink altogether because he was too busy thinking about the oscillating swings of life.
Near the waterfall, various interrelated performances of death were being enacted. Chaitanya Aseem, whose family name was Kushal Regmi before he became a disciple of Osho and took on a new name, was performing his own death by climbing onto the Chita, or his own funeral pyre. Later, he explained in a clearing near the meditation hall that his performance was symbolic was his death and rebirth. He had died as Kushal Regmi while at the same time simultaneously rediscovering himself as a new person, as Chaitanya Aseem.
Themes of hope and rebirth, however, not only mixed with the theme of physical death but also with deathlike political impasse represented in Mukesh Malla’s installation. Following the steps we descended downhill to reach a wooden cabin. In a clearing in front of the cabin, Mukesh Malla had, had installed his art to describe the current political impasse. At one corner of the ground was a cooking pot hanging upside down. The imaginary food inside the pot was being cooked by imaginary fire as the representatives of the three political forces in the nation - signified by the three primary colours of red, yellow and green, sat immovable, neither of them making slightest of the moves to correct the cooking pot of the nation.
The representatives of the three political forces were gazing intently at an empty chair on the other side of the grass. They were designing competing plans to acquire the power and position that it symbolised. Meanwhile the upside down cooking pot continued to flame in an imaginary fire as the nation was overwhelmed by the intimations of death.
The site of meditation at the Tapovan was crammed with memories. Symbolic suggestions of blood and massacre and dismembered body organs memorised the recent history of Nepal, narrating the nation at the interface of nature and art. At the same time, there were private, personal histories, histories that happen in the lives of numerous people, perhaps all of us, and yet remain irrevocably private.
This is because human beings, after all, are lonely creatures, lonely both at the moments of birth and death. Salil Subedi explained to us how he upturned a wooden bench by the stone steps and transformed it into a work of art. The upturned bench was hanging upside down - thus recalling the upside down cooking pot nearby - attached as it was precariously to a nearby bush. Upon the dusty ground were torn slippers and marbles, red, pink and blue. Salil explained that with the bench upturned the perspectives were reversed. The eyes that might have looked upward towards the sky were forced to gaze towards the ground, a ground representing one’s personal past: memories of torn slippers and colourful marbles of childhood.
Somewhere in between the memories of historical trauma and personal remembrance, suspended between the performances of living and dying, Asmina Ranjit had tried to capture time. She had asked one of her co-artists to paint her own shadow at various places that she stood. While the painted outline of her shadow remained, however, her actual shadow disappeared as time passed by.
Even as the nation was riddled with bullets and the fountain of blood continued to ooze from its hidden crags, however, time continued to move turning children into adults and adults into old men and women. Faced by the tyranny of time Asmina tried to “coax the nature” by warmly hugging the visiting audience, an act representing human compassion. The act of Asmina hugging the visitors was reproduced in a video screen, which was set up few steps downhill in the direction of the waterfall. Despite of the impermanence of life, and the deathlike political immobility of Nepal depicted by Mukesh Malla, the expressions of compassion and love were still possible as nature and culture, life and art crossed into each other’s borders at Nagarjun.Posted on: 2003-12-19 03:52
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