Talk Program with UIC South Asia Reading Group
UIC South Asia Reading group invites you to our first (virtual) talk of Spring 2024! Mekh Limbu and Lavkant Chaudhury of ArTree Nepal Collective will be talking to us about indigenous art and resistance in Nepal. Register at https://go.uic.edu/EngagingNepal
limbu(yakthung) indigenous community’s supreme god
This is Yakthung (limbu) Indigenous community’s Yuma(Supreme god) and Tambhoongna (forest god) worships based on nature.
Yakthung-Silam Sakma-symbol of block the death path
Nepali Artists: Hitmaan Gurung, Mekh Limbu and Sheelasha Rajbhandari
Doha- based Artists: Carolina Aranibar Fernandez (Bolivia), Emelina Soares (India), Abdulla AlKuwari (Qatar)
Performance by Sunil Sigdel
Curated by Dina Bangdel
Exhibition Date : March 24- April 9 2017
Venue: CALM, Tangalwood
This curatorial project responds to the theme of the first Kathmandu Triennale “Curated Showcase” on CITY and the urban landscape. My longstanding interest in the built heritage and the dynamics of the urban landscape and the agency of the community have been central to my research, and has in this project combined both the curatorial intent within a strong research-‐based intervention. Notion that the city can be seen as an instigator and catalyst for creative narratives is at the core of this interdisciplinary focus. The experience is mediated through the voices/lenses of the diaspora Nepalis living in Doha to explore these spaces of liminality within the city. How do these communities express narratives of home, belonging, and self within the city? How do artistic expression/entanglements serve to ‘create communities’ within the urban fabric? Artists will then create a body of work that will respond to these transcultural intersections, the lived histories and memories, and narratives of Doha’s past histories.
The practices of the six artists for this collaborative project complement the exploration of two cities: Doha and Kathmandu, with the notion of city serving as the catalyst for dialogue. The city of Doha has historically been a rich palimpsest of cultures—particularly those of South Asia—and the focus of this research-‐based curatorial project will be on the ways in which artists experiences and identities will touch upon multivalent narratives, story-‐telling, and orality.
Parallel Life story of Nepalese migrant worker and his family
Nepal has undergone tremendous socio-political changes in the last few decades – from the democratic movement in the late eighties, the protracted civil war, the abolition of monarchy and the establishment of a republic. Simultaneously, various movements along the lines of gender and ethnicity also entered the public discourse. In parallel, global forces urged citizens to migrate locally and internationally. Then the April, 2015 earthquakes further destabilized lives, causing death and displacement.
Numerous Nepalis work in the Middle East and in Malaysia. Meanwhile, the income they send back to Nepal allow his family to migrate to bigger towns from rural outposts, emptying villages.
Age-old urban/rural structures are changing; traditional knowledge chains are breaking; families are getting torn apart. People are giving up on agriculture, which was a typical source of sustenance.
The uncertain and unstable political climate doesn’t help any of this. If anything, the migrant labor industry allows government officials to remain passive instead of taking active steps to help their citizens and their country.
Using this national background, I wanted to depict the parallel lives of a Nepali migrant worker and his family in Nepal – how a worker spends his day on the construction site and how his family migrates from rural villages to bigger towns and also how his family compel to migrate and at the same time what kind of situation happening in Nepal.
I used the comics medium to narrate the monotonous lives of migrant workers’ – the rigor and boredom of a job that continues six days a week except on Friday. Friday, in Qatar, is a holiday..
SECOND HOME
“I have been building your houses and country for my home and family. My own home is becoming empty and abandoned. But, I feel that Qatar is also my second home ”
My father left for Qatar when I was eight years old. This year for the first time, I visited the city that my father had called ‘home’ for 21 years—an imagined place that had an invisible connection with me all my life. What is this place called ‘home’ ?
Since 1996, my father has constructed around 200 residential houses in Doha, Qatar. Qatar is second home for my father. He says “My own home Nepal feels like my ‘father in-law’s’ house, where I go occasionally as a special guest. In 21 years, I have only been back 5 times.” Over these years, he has seen the Doha skyline rise from the sands of the desert. And he has build houses that have becomes homes for families. Yet, his own home is empty and abandoned, as the family has moved in city. The village is empty.
For the 400,000 Nepalese migrant workers’ family and home have this familiar story. They are only not supporting family and country, they are also contributing for Qatar. The multimedia installation explore this invisible/visible connection between Nepal and Qatar—through my father’s eyes.
I captured almost 100 houses which are made by my father in Qatar during 21 years which is mapping on Google earth. I try to connect houses with history when he was making houses at the same time what is happening in Nepal and I also include timelapse of Doha Qatar and photographs of my home and my father’s portraits. I try to show contribution of Nepalese worker in Qatar, at the same time what is going on his/her home in Nepal.
The Work of Art is a Scream of Freedom – Artree Nepal Open Studio-2017, Collateral with Kathmandu Triennale
The different historical periods in Nepal have introduced different rulers who established and adopted various laws and systems that primarily favored themselves. Consequently, there have always been social, political and cultural discriminations; as well as exclusion, injustice, and instability. There have been conflicts and struggle for demanding reforms against such injustice that prevails in the country.
In the year 1996, Maoist rebels accused the ruling monarch and the mainstream political parties and labeled government forces as “feudal forces”. As a result, that led to a decade long civil war which claimed the lives of 17,000 people, a displacement of an estimated 100,000 more, and brought about the end of a 240-year old monarchy.
The conflict brought out the voices of marginalized people to the national agenda – particularly of groups like Madhesi, Dalits (the ‘untouchables’), women, the landless and indigenous people — and widened the political space to articulate their grievances. The result was a series of protests and movements across the country by the Madhesi (people from the Tarai lowland) and indigenous people. Yet, very little progress has been made, challenges remain and the country continues to be politically unstable.
During the Maoist civil war, internal and international mass migration increased exponentially. After the civil war, continuous political conflicts and an unstable government have ignited violence, chaos and uncertainty in the country. This has caused an unexpected rise in mass migration, especially over the past decade, and especially to the Middle East where Nepalese continue to go in unprecedented numbers in search of employment and a better livelihood.
As more and more Nepali citizens aspire for foreign jobs and depart their homeland, profound changes have occurred in the socio-economic fabric of the country. Although the labour migration phenomenon has emerged as an alternative livelihood opportunity for many Nepali households, it imposes new challenges for the government and policy-makers in implementing and managing safe migratory flows between the countries of origin and destination.
Hitman Gurung’s work, ‘Labour’s Helmet’, from the series “I Have to Feed Myself, My Family and My Country…” deals with Nepali migrant labours who leave their families and country to join transitory work forces in foreign countries. These larger economic forces have long-lasting and often unalterable impacts on the global economy as well as on individuals, communities and societies. Emerging from his concern about this phenomenon, Gurung’s work addresses these various impacts.
Mekh Limbu’s work entitled ‘Silent Portraits in Qatar and Kathmandu’ has captured the silent and still portraits of migrant workers in Qatar. He has juxtaposed these portraits with a time lapse video of Kathmandu, indicating his own shifts around different places in the city. With the help of remittance cash sent by migrant workers, families move to bigger and more developed towns and cities within the country in search of a better and brighter life. Limbu’s work demonstrates how international migration has triggered rapid internal migration in Nepal in the past two decades.
Bikash Shrestha’s work, ‘The Family Album’, is a commentary on the mobility of family members and its impact within individual families. People leave their homes and relocate in different places in search of a better life. As a result, small villages and communities get deserted. Members from a single family are scattered across the globe. Only the toothless population (the very old and the very young) are left behind as a representation of an entire family.
Subas Tamang’s work, “I Want To Die In My Own House”, is an autobiographical commentary that also represents the dreams of thousands of dislocated family members in Nepal who move from small villages to bigger towns and cities. When people move, they usually rent a room, compromise with the situation, and struggle for survival. A permanent address is an important marker of a person’s identity in our culture that symbolizes wealth and prosperity. This wish may come true for some but the uncertainty remains. The continuous challenges of securing their daily breads and a decent livelihood – as well as nursing a hope to have a permanent roof above their heads – often traps families in an unending and vicious cycle of struggle.
Sheelasha’s art work ‘Agony of The New Bed’ brings out the ignored reality of gender discrimination. In traditional arranged marriages of Nepal, ownership of a daughter is transferred from a father to a husband. Thus, a girl’s identity and dignity are dependent on her husband after her marriage. Brides are socially forced to shift their identities and adopt their husbands’, just like they are made to abandon their own surname and house and adopt their husbands’. A new bride’s life revolves around uncertainty as she has to shift to a new family, a new space and a new social circle. Numerous social researches have documented the fact that a high proportion of young married females (as opposed to those unmarried) become victims of domestic and sexual violence. Marital rapes are not uncommon. Unfortunately, social pressures and brides’ immaturity restrict them from speaking up in self-defense, even in extremely harsh conditions. And the tradition has been continuing from generation to generation, with only little changes.
Lavkant has explored issues related to Tharu peoples’ identity in line with larger issues of indigenous equality and social discrimination. His work is an annotation to the state violence perpetrated on the Tharu people in the aftermath of the protests that took place after the promulgation of the constitution of Nepal in 2015, where the Tharus raised their voice against political and economic inequality. The bullets, suppressing various grains and flours, represent this violence against Tharu people’s destructed homes and habitations.
Chasma Magowa is a Selfie or Selfish? Exposing oneself on the media, especially on social media, depends on a user’s or a creator’s choice. But looking at and commenting is the choice of a viewer. Sachin borrowed spectacles and glasses from his relatives and friends and then took selfies at different times, during different events and places in search of a connection. This photography-based works ironically represents the situation of a large population who are influenced and connected by cyber culture.
Scream comes out of agony, grief and struggle that people experience in their lives. We all expect happiness, equality, and prosperity in any situation but the reality for many Nepalese is the harsh, laborious condition of deserts, the extreme mountainous cliffs and difficult inner conflicts and dilemmas with regards to individual desires and boundaries within concrete and abstract walls. In any given situation, people scream for the sake of freedom.
“The Work of Art is Scream of Freedom” title for open-studio is taken from the statement by prominent artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff.
ArTree Nepal
Artists Collective
Participant Artists
Bikash Shrestha, Hitmaan Gurung, Lavkant Chaudhary, Mekh Limbu, Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Sachin Yogol Shrestha Subas Tamang
Open Studio
Date : 2-15 April 2017
Time : 10 am to 7 pm
venue : ArTree Nepal, Samarpan Margh, Tripureshwoar, Kathandu
Shree Janaki Budha Subba Primary School, Kurule tenupa-6 Sogum, Dhankuta
My Home where I grew up.
My House at Kurule Tenupa-6 Sogum, Dhankuta, Nepal
Kurule Tenupa VDC, From MudebashVDC, Dhankuta
mekh limbu 