Team L&M
The premier international platform for global contemporary arts in our neighbouring nation of Nepal, Kathmandu Triennale this year will be held between October 27 and November 27. Organised by Siddhartha Arts Foundation (SAF), the Triennale was due to take place in December 2020 but delayed due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
As an acknowledgement to the Triennale’s deep rooting in the art and viewpoints of Nepal as well as of the multiple temporal displacements Covid-19 pandemic has brought, the Triennale has decided to mark its next edition as Kathmandu Triennale 2077 – the current year of the Nepali calendar. The change of emphasis towards this ancestral system of counting time is in solidarity with the many efforts to decolonise references that the Triennale seeks to present in its programme.
The Triennale will be led by artistic director Cosmin Costinas (executive director and curator of Para Site, Hong Kong) alongside co-curators Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung (Nepal-based artists). “We are primarily searching for appropriate ways to acknowledge and display the multiplicity of art histories and languages as well as their reflection of plural ways of dreaming, representing, measuring, and mapping the world, in its medical, social, technological, and cosmic dimensions,” shared Costinas. To this, Sheelasha Rajbhandari added, ““Issues connected to migration and displacement, individual and collective trauma and healing, the body, sexuality, and feminist praxis will also be at the core of the Triennale, with a strong anchoring in conversations that have informed the Nepali political and public sphere following its re-establishment as a multi-ethnic republic almost two decades ago.”
