KU Art+Design’s week-long exhibition at the
Nepal Art Council in Babar Mahal which ran until Wednesday was the creative explosion of a generation of graduates from
Kathmandu University’s Bachelor of Fine Arts.
BFA Exhibition Project 2014 signified unfettered creativity as much as the discipline required to complete a four-year degree and six months of intensive studio work – the installations, even the most straightforward of which deviate from what Nepali audiences might traditionally define as “Art”, were a collective revelation.
Living as they do in a country struggling to reconcile past and present, it was no surprise that much of the work on display grappled with themes of environmental degradation and socio-political boundaries. Many of the artists drew on the familiar to refresh our understanding of a culture besieged by modernity. Kiran Rai’s startling mechanical prostheses for mythical creatures, such as a pair of shiny metal wings for a garud that flaps about with unwieldy grace at the flick of a switch, shatter our perceptions of myth as something frozen in time. The notion of beauty itself was challenged by Prajwal Bhattarai, whose “re-cycles” reveal a deep understanding of how (discarded) objects can be repurposed to recall wholly different arenas of aesthetic endeavour.
In a related sense, Anish Bajracharya and Tsewang Lama play with reinterpretations of that which is familiar to Nepalis. Bajracharya’s refashioning of the iconic Goldstar, the “shoe of the masses”, was simply inspired. Or as he put it in the tagline for his imaginary brand (albeit fronted with real shoes that I was tempted to try on), “inspired by the land”. If Goldstar dares to come out with a shoe that incorporates within its design Nepal’s plains, hills, water bodies and mountains, it would be, if you’ll excuse the pun, “revolutionary”. Lama’s critique of urbanisation, meanwhile, could be viewed as one more in a long line of anguished responses to Kathmandu’s apparently inexorable decline. But his representations of the chaos of the capital churn inside of the viewer’s mind. The style recalls the clichéd touristic vistas of Nepal’s mountains, temples and alleys; the content, conflagrations of cars and concrete, quite literally demolishes that becalming notion.
I remember the excitement I felt when I encountered US-based artist Binod Shrestha’s installation, Rhythm of Solitude, at the Yala Maya Kendra in Patan. Back in 2009, it seemed to me that installation art was a relatively new chapter for Nepali contemporary art. BFA Exhibition Project 2014 proved that explorations in this genre are far advanced. The young Nepali artists on show at the Nepal Art Council which ran until 6 August were poised, like the aforementioned mechanical Garuda, to launch into their self-defined, disparate orbits before too long – this was a rare opportunity to catch them all in the flesh and ask them about the worlds they envision, before they have quite created them.
Nepali kukur