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HIT MAN GURUNG (left) and SHEELASHA RAJBHANDARI (right) have joined the curatorial team for the 2020 Kathmandu Triennale. Courtesy ArTree Nepal.
On September 18, the Kathmandu Triennale named artists and cultural organizers Hit Man Gurung and Sheelasha Rajbhandari as co-curators of the 2020 edition. They join director Sharareh Bajracharya and artistic director Cosmin Costinas in organizing the cultural festival, which is slated to open in early December 2020.
Gurung and Rajbhandari have collaborated on several projects to date, including as co-artistic directors of “12 Bishakh – Camp.Hub,” a community art project set up in response to the devastating earthquake that struck the Himalayan nation on April 25, 2015. As artists, Gurung and Rajbhandari were both featured in the recent survey “Nepal Art Now” held at Weltmuseum Wien.
Gurung works in painting, performance, collage, and installation and has tackled the problem of mass migration and the legacy of the decade-long Maoist insurgency in Nepal. His works were featured in the second, third, and fourth editions of the Dhaka Art Summit, and, in 2016, at the first Yinchuan Biennale and the eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane.
The co-founder of the artist group ArTree Nepal, Rajbhandari is interested in the oral histories, mythologies, and folk rituals of Nepali communities. Rajbhandari’s works were featured in the 2018 international touring exhibition “A Beast, a God, and a Line,” curated by Costinas.
Kathmandu Triennale 2020 is organized by the Siddhartha Arts Foundation, which also produced the Kathmandu International Arts Festival in 2009 and 2012. Artistic director Cosmin Costinas revealed to ArtAsiaPacific that the 2020 edition would focus on topics including decolonization, migration and displacement, indigenous knowledge, and new definitions of Asian art in relation to the Euro-American canon. Organizers anticipate showing artworks by more than 90 artists at multiple sites across the Kathmandu valley, including historical buildings in Patan, Boudha, and Kathmandu itself. The Triennale will coincide with the biennial Photo Kathmandu festival, and will open just before the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala and the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, as part of a new constellation of events emerging across South Asia.
HG Masters is the deputy editor and deputy publisher of ArtAsiaPacific.
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