Experimenting with Mediums: On Sunita Maharjan’s Mixed Media Works
In the recently concluded edition of the Kathmandu Triennale held from 1-31 March, a central position is occupied by artists working from within and with multiple aesthetic and cosmological perspectives in their practices. These include practices that have been systematically excluded from the larger realm of art. They have been designated by a colonial, ethnographic gaze as craft, folklore, or at best, "traditional" art, despite their parallel cultural and social roles in their respective communities, just as art does in the global society. Moreover, these practices are also constantly evolving and embodying the traces of their contextual transformation as well as this oft-disobedient instability. The Triennale, thus, is particularly interested in contemporary practices where indigenous perspectives operate in the field of technology, where bodies and traditions are queered, where masks and rituals are the site of continuously negotiated identities and where folklore is the battlefield of decoloniality, counterculture and criticality.
The Triennale seeks to expand contemporary artistic practices to include materiality and media from communities not only in Nepal but from around the world. These would include different forms and lineages of object-, image- and sound-making that transverse or unfold parallelly to the fractures of the modern. They seek to start a wider conversation about different meanings in the realms of spirituality, forms of healing, memory preservation, representation of mythology and collective celebrations. Broadening the scope of what is included today as art can have political implications. It is part of an effort to decolonise our conscience, moving beyond art as defined by the colonial legacies across contexts as well as of our shared global culture.
In this on-site conversation between Triennale curator Sheelasha Rajbhandari and visual artist and art educator Sunita Maharjan, we look at Maharjan’s installation Above the Earth, Beneath the Sky, where wheat grows out of tall iron pillars, indicating the vertically shifting landscape of plantations in Kathmandu. Given the continuous development and rapid urbanisation, communities that were previously agricultural are now growing food solely on their rooftops. In Maharjan’s other work, a two-minute-long video titled Act of Finding Line, the artist plants rice saplings while talking to nature that surrounds her. In this conversation with Rajbhandari, Maharjan discusses her ancestral profession of farming, the many indigenous knowledge systems, her curiosity about human intervention in the natural world and how she attends to this through her artistic explorations with natural material.
(Featured Image: Installation view of Above the Earth, Beneath the Sky at Taragaon Museum, Kathmandu. By Katha Haru. 2022. Courtesy of Kathmandu Triennale 2077.)
Recorded on 30 March 2022.
The first in the series of conversations with artists from Kathmandu Triennale 2077 can be viewed here.
