Children from the Dragon Kingdom

Suman Subba

It is about children finding their identity again though hardship and injustice. It is about telling a government that children are suffering and that nothing and nowhere can ever be ethnically pure. No government, country in the world has the right to do this. For it is a crime. It is a crime against history and all our collective humanity. And the children have journeyed with their parents to a land where they have been forced to come and to combat this enforced displacement the children have given birth to images and words that try to build a bridge of empathy between them and the audience.

The pictures draw us into their world. We cannot sit back. We are forced to enter for it looks ostensibly normal. There is much poverty in Nepal and the poverty one sees in the black and white images looks normal. But you know it is different. It is the nightmare of refugee camps. There are no pictures taken at night. The pictures show the day and their daily lives. But it is the day which hides the darkness behind their faces, living inside their minds.

There is writing hung on the walls of the gallery in Baggikhana (where the exhibition is on till Tuesday) telling of torture and drawings, like crayon drawings done by children’s hands showing torture. Is this what the minds of children should be like? Who was it that gave them such images to play with? What made them do such a thing?

There are photos of faces and hands holding placards, reminding you of a British artist’s same idea but with a video camera, that look out at you with utmost simplicity. There is no subterfuge here. These are voices that transcend bilateral talks and the language of governments. A small child smiles into the camera with a placard that says "I am a star of Bhutan". Another shows an old woman sitting on a stool with one that says "I want to be..(but the "be" is crossed out as if she knows that she may never see the end of the refugee camp) and instead she writes the word "Die", "I want to die in Bhutan".

A photo shows three youths standing together as if in a trinity. They stand back to back as if they are under attack, as if they are one unit joined and inseparable. Yet at the same time they are facing directions of possibility and at the same time it suggests that they are stuck fast. One image presents a man staring at the camera and his words say something like even though there are no tears on my face it doesn’t mean that I am not crying for my heart is crying.

These are not portraits done by children from any ordinary school. They are from special schools, terribly special. One of the student photographers, Aite Maya Rai and her friend, Mon Maya, grade eight students of Marigold Academy, one of eight different schools from the seven different UNHCR maintained Refugee Camps in Jhapa and Morang, say they would definitely like to go back to Bhutan even if they have spent the last nine years in the camps and remember nothing of the country.

Set up and brought together by PhotoVoice, which gives training in photography for the marginalised, the Rose Class (the name of the group of students drawn from the different schools), learnt to handle the manual SLR in six weeks. The class was conceived back in 1998 when Tiffany Fairey then a student of Anthropology in England came to the refugee camp in Jhapa to carry out research and was moved enough to set up the Rose Class. She was touched by the people and wanted to realise the project and take it to a higher level.

She talks about frustration at their plight, their days left to die on the edges of nowhere and how it’s under reported back home and abroad. And so the children were given a format, a platform to tell the story themselves. And the voices and images are there like documents for anybody willing enough to come, see and listen.

What the artist fished out

Dikshya Thakuri

With a view to garner more publicity for this city’s artists the Bamboo Gallery has once again opened a new exhibition in its grounds. For those thirsty for some untraditional art then the sculptures of the artist Gopal Das Shrestha or ‘Kalapremi’ are on show.

Set up at a cost of about one and half to two lakhs to himself, and the works going for around Rs 2500-45000, Shrestha’s small sculptures (many made out of Nepali paper) play with the image of the goldfish and what it means to him through a myriad of associations. According to him they are very human. Their open mouths suggest hunger, greed, and the continuous flow of desire. He sees and captures the goldfish in the form of soft women.

Modern art sculpture has only recently been introduced in Nepal but traditional carving has been around since anything of any artistic value was created and cast in this country. That being so, it is also far more popular. Kalapremi agrees that this unthinking reliance on tradition is what holds real art and its development and appreciation back. Like nearly all artists he repeats that to survive on art alone is very difficult especially in this country. "Art alone is very difficult", he says. To survive and create more time for his own individual work, he works as a fine arts teacher in two schools and a college.

Modern art to Kalapremi, who has been sculpting for twenty years, means western influences. He points out that European influence in architecture in Nepal started during the Rana rule and at least in terms of architectural development it was beneficial. But somewhere along the line after the Malla period (a period when he feels that a lot of the art was ahead of its own time), development got stuck.

This stunted growth is compounded by false appreciation which stops the true growth of good artists here which is further compounded by the lack of good art criticism which ultimately leads to no true appreciation. Kalapremi bemoans the lack of this symbiotic process, art and criticism, the one existing and working with the other.

As to his art, for larger images, he sketches it out first and then works on small sizes and then only starts on the larger size. In a lot of his work, there is also a process of meditation involved when he starts to associate an object with a host of things. One can find his sculptors also at The Fulbari Resort in Pokhara and The Club Himalaya in Nagarkot.

Kalapremi’s biggest collectors are the Swiss couple Albin Gaterio and Sarlotte. "They love collecting art pieces and so far they have over 50 of my work. Dinesh Bahadur Shrestha and Piyush Bahadur Amatya are also regular buyers in Nepal. The buyers generally come early to select good pieces."

One thing that still fascinates him is watching the devotees line up on Krishna Asthami in front of the Krishna temple he built out of cement when he was just eight years old. He and his mother were labourers and this probably helped him lay the foundation of his artistic desires. In retrospect, he says that his childhood was in a way responsible for making him what he is.

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