Working under a particular theme seems to have been a good challenge for the team of 12 young artists of Re-fuzed, who have tried to bring in their individual interpretations through site-specific installations that raise various questions and concerns related to refugees and their problems, locally and globally.
Dipesh Ranjit’s installation, located next to the Kumari Ghar, with photographs and what looks like a collage of a face from far, appears to be a haphazard last minute work. Given that it is adjacent to Sunita and Sanjeev Maharjan’s installation ‘Flying Luggage’, which is one of the best installations in the group. The bags and bundles of various sizes, attached with wings made from foam, hang from wires and cast shadows on the brick pavement. Without a place to call home, a person’s entire life is perhaps in that one bundle.
As Flying Luggage evokes and engages viewers in a passive manner, Priti Sherchan’s ‘Identity’ and Ramesh Maharjan’s ‘Refugee Voices’ ask the audience to interact with their pieces via writing.
Identity with its nine pairs of hanging mirrors, located right at the entrance to the Square, makes a commanding statement as it literally makes people reflect on their identities, which range from personal and political to religious and cultural. How would a refugee define his or her identity as they move across borders displaced by conflicts, live in shelters and lack several basic human rights, one of which is a nationality? How would a newly resettled Bhutanese refugee in the USA feel about his or her identity?
Hundreds of sticky notes fill up the back of the plywood that reads ‘Identity’, but not all viewers seemed to have taken Sherchan’s question seriously. Similar is the case with Refugee Voices that has T-shirts printed with ‘Only one goal, to return home.’ While one viewer’s opinion reads ‘Let them back’, another one writes ‘I am vampire.’
‘War, Peace and Borders’ by Aditya Aryal is a somewhat literal interpretation of the refugee situation as hollow see-through body molds made from tape, hang from strings stretched across bars to mark boundaries. In between, lays a barbed wire. The piece is visually captivating as opposed to works by Gyanu Gurung and Shil Shova Shakya.
Laxman Karmachaya’s installation, also with mirrors, and Rabindra Man Kapali’s ‘Diversity’ don’t hold one’s attention for too long, as they are overshadowed by other bigger pieces – ‘Hope’ by Shraddha Shrestha and ‘Borders’ by Sudeep Balla.
Hope is an installation with the simple message of hope and it stands out in the Square with its bright yellow color. On the other hand, Balla’s Borders leans toward a rather cliché interpretation.
For one, the knowledge of John Lennon’s famous song ‘Imagine’ is limited to an urban community; and secondly, while the artist asks his viewers to cut the strings sewn in the canvas, there are no scissors available to do so. How do you ask your viewer to interact with your piece, when you can’t provide them with the tools? As much as the artist has labored in creating the painting, the utopian concept of no boundaries is not creative enough.
Unlike at Bhaktapur, where there was a seamless path created for viewers with installations having no boundaries, at the current exhibition the delineations of each work are specific. Re-fuzed as a group, therefore, loses its strength of cohesiveness. However, the individual pieces allow one to assess each artist’s work independently and some of them definitely outshine their fellow artists.
Related story
Life in Basantapur
