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Unearthing stories in statistics
Hitmaan Gurung’s work at the Dhaka Art Summit speaks of an obliteration of identities, and comments on the Nepali government’s indifference to the hardships that millions of Nepali migrant labourersKurchi Dasgupa
Hitmaan Gurung’s work at the Dhaka Art Summit speaks of an obliteration of identities, and comments on the Nepali government’s indifference to the hardships that millions of Nepali migrant labourers
The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) took place in Bangladesh’s capital city in early February this year. Organised by the Samdani Art Foundation, the-three-day event brought together more than 300 artists from nine South Asian countries and beyond, and saw a footfall of hundreds of thousands. Installed entirely in the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy building, the event was free for all to attend. More interestingly, with its new edition DAS broke away from its booth-centric art fair approach and instead explored a renewed commitment towards being a research based platform through a series of tightly curated group exhibitions, solo commissions and historical surveys.
Nepal’s very own Hitmaan Gurung found a place in the central exhibition called Mining Warm Data curated by the summit’s artistic director Diana Campbell Betancourt herself. His work hung next to Bangladesh born Hasan Elahi’s composite digital print showing a fraction of the 32,000 self-surveillance images that he had taken since 9/11 as a gesture of resistance to an FBI investigation into his movements. It provided an inverted context to Gurung’s I Have to Feed Myself, My Family and My Country and the subtle juxtaposition bore witness to Campbell Betancourt’s curatorial acumen. While Elahi voiced his resistance through acute, intimate documentation of a perfectly ordinary life that the US government was taking an undue interest in, Gurung’s work commented on Nepal government’s equally undue indifference to the hardships that millions of ordinary Nepali migrant labourers habitually face. Collaging currency notes to depict food thali-s and an airborne plane against a background of employment advertisements for migrant workers, Hitman brought ‘a macro-problem to a micro-level,’ says the DAS catalogue. Given its muted tones, the piece’s poignancy might have, however, been bypassed by the 500 plus heavyweight art honchos, who had descended upon the summit from institutions as exciting as the MOMA, the Tate, the Stedelijk, or The Serpentine. For the story of disillusionment and trauma that dogs the Nepali migrant labourer is one that is yet to be discovered by the international media—occasional references do pop up, but never quite touch upon the complexities that make such migration the only hope of a better life for an increasingly large number of Nepalis. I Have to Feed Myself, My Family and My Country is part of an ongoing series by Gurung and he had earlier shown at DAS 2014 a composite piece from the same series comprising a wooden coffin, paintings and photographs backed by official records and documentation. In 2014, Gurung had managed to source an original coffin bearing a migrant worker’s body, one of the many hundreds that arrive every year at Tribhuvan International Airport from distant lands. The interior of the installed coffin is lined with photographs of those who have applied for visas as migrant workers, each image written over with destinations and places of origin. Miniscule photocopies of their passports covered the outer surface of the coffin with a world map drawn across the surface, zooming in on countries where the most number of migrants have lost their lives—an unparalleled visual tool for driving the message home. A set of twelve headless portraits accompanied the piece, each wearing a ‘khata’ and the icon representing their private dreams of a better future painted in place of the face—be it a television set, a schoolbag, or a set of children’s clothes. The voiceless, powerless underprivileged of Nepal leave their home and country in search of a better future, but usually end up being badly exploited or victimised; their dreams often ending in death, as in the painting of the mother carrying a coffin bearing the images of dead bodies. Letters sent home, bound in the red thread that symbolises death, hung above the painting. The entire piece acted as a portal into a reality we are divorced from—where ordinary, everyday people risk death to support their families and by extension, their nation. It was exciting to note that the series was being followed with persistence by the DAS, which is fast emerging as the voice for artists treading the difficult and less trodden path in South Asia.
While Gurung’s work speak of obliteration of identities, even lives, the work that hung next to his at Mining Warm Data was by Tibet’s Nortse and talks about visualising from above or from across a cultural gap. Three images of his performances Prayer Wheel, Big Brother, and Automan (2007) ‘allude to the personal struggles that Tibetans living in Tibet face, where they are expected to be either the traditional pious Tibetan, the corrupt informer or even, perhaps, the superhero, all idealised imaginings of a Tibetan as seen through Western eyes.’
Labour and its exploitation returns with Jaffna’s S Hanusha’s multi-object installation that went digging into the traumatised lives of generations of Sri Lanka’s tea-plantation workers. Through a clever play of words, objects and archival photographs Hanusha helps unravel the ‘indelible stain’, much like tea itself, that exploitation and deprivation leave on the self and the community.
There were 18 artists from South Asia showcased in this particular section of DAS 2016, of whom I mention only a handful and that too in direct spatial context to Gurung’s work. Overall Mining Warm Data was about unearthing the stories that lie hidden inside dry statistics. It is an effort to put a human face to the rapid informationalisation that our world is undergoing. Informational onslaught no doubt draws attention to issues and help produce deliverables for development project graphs, but it also desensitises us. We need to be careful that we do not allow the statistics to get under our skin and be blinded into shutting off the actual trauma suffered by human beings around us, people who are very like us in real life actually.
(This article is the first of a two-part series on the Dhaka Art Summit)