Marking Times
KATHMANDU, JAN 28 – On the top floor of the Siddhartha Art Gallery, Babermahal, artist Sujan Chitrakar, surrounded by a group of audience, walks up to a clay vessel filled with water. He dips his head and then sits down on a nearby stool. A man walks up to him and starts to shave his head. This is the start of The Marks of Our Time.
The performance, The Marks of Our Time, was jointly curated by Pranab Man Singh and Sangeeta Thapa and was held yesterday at 2 pm. Dedicated to the artist’s grandfather, Chiniya Chitrakar, the work was an interactive performance that went on for about two hours.
After the shave, the artist, with his top off, sat on a pedestal with his eyes closed as people started to write names on his body. The names were those of the 601 CA members, who were supposed to complete the constitution-writing process by January 22. The viewers got up one by one to pick up name-chits from a fishbowl, read the names written on them aloud and then wrote the names on the artist’s body with white paint.
Gradually, Chitrakar’s bare skin—including his face that bore a somber expression—was covered with paint, rendering him almost invisible against the white backdrop.
Once all the names were written down on the artist’s body, he slowly got up, walked to the terracotta vessel and started to wash the paint off of his body. He then put on a t-shirt hung on the wall, wore his shoes and walked out of the gallery.
According to the curatorial note pasted on the gallery wall, the work is a “participatory performance” that “is a testament of our times”. The work is the artist’s commentary—or frustration, to put it precisely—on the current political condition of Nepal. The whole set-up is almost like a metaphor for the effort and decision of the people (a collective act), the process and the outcome.
And ultimately, the artist, in his final state of the performance—written on, and then wiped out, all the while with an expressionless face—is Nepal; a Nepali.
