Meanwhile…: Measuring Time with Karan Shrestha

For artist Karan Shrestha, time is a convoluted measure as encapsulated in his works that disarm the viewer’s understanding of stillness and passage. Working across photography, moving images, text, drawing and installation, Shrestha’s practice re-examines notions of being present in nature, history and society. In this conversation, the artist discusses the series of photographs Waiting for Nepal (2011-12) and two videos, meanwhile (2017) and chobar (2016), to draw out the complexities of time in relation to Nepali history and its people. 

Veeranganakumari Solanki (VS): Time is a recurring element in your practice that brings with it aspects and layers of history and memory. Could you describe your reading of time and the way it unfolds in your work?

Karan Shrestha (KS): I am interested in how the pluralism of experienced time is condensed into linearity and its subsequent outcomes. This is evident in our region (South Asia) where people are compartmentalised in oppressive hierarchical social systems. Depending on how communities are positioned socially or geographically, time is either an affordance or a movement to abide by. The working class and the marginalised are locked into timelines created for them. This violation is woven into bodies, in people’s approaches to their environments. Through a lens-based practice, working with the documentary image, the outside enters the frame along with the architecture of memory and history. My work attempts to grasp these restraints. In the Nepali context, the use of memories to establish identities in time is a recent phenomenon, as notions of Western modernism continue to spread. For most part, sharing a collective history has informed communities’ identification.

VS: Waiting for Nepal (2011–12), was a series that brought in the complexities of time in relation to politics and the way Nepal, as a country, was grappling with ruptures in its own system. Were there any particular incidents or experiences that led you to create this body of work that weighs in moments of pause?

KS: I would not call it a pause—that becomes an external reading of the images. It was an impasse. There was widespread apathy, a severe lack of essentials and poor governance. Promises of social reform that fuelled the revolution had faded as the post-conflict transition period dragged on. I set out to make a photographic record of this experience, while simultaneously making notes. There are facets of life that can only be encountered on the streets. What I was getting at was the recurrence, not a fleeting or shocking moment. So much turns unseen by virtue of repetition. It was a gradual awareness of the numerous complexities associated with the act of waiting—a form of structural violence committed by the system on its subject. Since then, observing waiting has been a preoccupation of sorts. The situation was not an anomaly. From accessing essentials, to employment, education, compensation, legal justice, health facilities and even human rights, people of Nepal are made to wait.

VS: The experience of the city in real time is translated in your film meanwhile (2017) that presents with curiosity, multiple perspectives of a single moment for different people. Could you elaborate on this aspect of wonder that often finds its way into your works?

KS: Gongabu, where meanwhile was recorded, sits outside the Ring Road that demarcates Kathmandu from its extension. On reaching the suburbs, or traveling to the fringes of any city, disparities become clearer. Gongabu consists largely of poorly constructed guesthouses and apartment buildings providing temporary accommodation to migrants. Daily wage workers and people waiting for permits and visas to go abroad for work are seen every afternoon on the footbridge. Coming from a working-class background, I am aware of this temporality that masks a loss of agency. All a person can cling to are aspirations. Perhaps that translates to wonder: the position assumed, the voyeuristic camera, shedding biases, observing pliant body language on the footbridge, finding moments of defiance... I visited the area four times over the course of a year before returning with a camera, responding to an impetus to document. In meanwhile we see how waiting has come to be a cultural pastime, a symptom of deep-rooted social differences.

VS: Browsing an archive of time in chobar (2016), the pace at which the film progresses and slows down in parts resembles searching for a moment in a fast-forward action of past memories. To conclude, could you describe this change and search in time for you?

KS: Chobar has mythical and religious significance, often traced to the origins of the Kathmandu valley in Newa legends. I stumbled upon 16mm footage of Chobar from the early 1960s. Half a century later, the place seemed like a dumping site. This video brings together film and digital footage of the same locations, shot at different frame rates, decades apart. It presents a vestige of what once was, speaking of an attitude towards environment, addressing generational amnesia but without nostalgia. Nostalgia is a comfort that I prefer to refrain from indulging in. I am suspicious of the accuracy of memory in capturing the past, however. And nature functions in a similar manner. Both are unreliable witnesses of time, offering glimpses of alterations.

chobar. (2016.)

All works by Karan Shrestha. Images and videos courtesy of the artist.

To read more about Karan Shrestha, please click here.