The India China Institute is excited to announce an exciting event taking place in Kathmandu, Nepal. ICI is partnering with The City Museum Kathmandu, the artists collective Lasanaa, and Nepali artists KG Ranjit and Ashmina Ranjit for a discussion and week-long art exhibition about the role of the arts and humanities in addressing climate change in the Himalaya.

The event includes a 24-hour performance piece by ASHMINA RANJIT at The City Museum Kathmandu’s CMK Gallery. The performance piece is part of the “Nature In Flux” exhibition organized by the India China Institute, LAH Lasanaa and The City Museum Kathmandu. The exhibition will also feature paintings by renowned artist, and Ashmina’s father, KG RANJIT.

Climate Change Himalaya: Engaging the Arts & Humanities

Climate change is the defining issue of our times. While the impacts of climate change are unevenly experienced around the world, communities in the Himalaya are some of the most vulnerable to change. Understanding and communicating these emerging changes is an increasingly important task for public engagement and education. Responding to this need, artists, poets, writers, photographers and filmmakers who live and work in the Himalaya are taking a more active role in documenting and presenting these changing climate landscapes to the public. To support these efforts, the India China Institute at The New School in New York and LASANAA, an alternative art space in Nepal, are working to develop a new collaboration focused on engaging the arts and humanities around climate change and the Himalaya.

There is no question that addressing climate change requires the best available science, but as we have learned, science alone is not enough to create action on climate change. To change people’s hearts and minds, and advance innovative and adaptive solutions to our current climate crisis, appeals to people’s deeply held values, ethics and spiritual beliefs are necessary—and it is here that creative thinkers (e.g. artists, writers, poets) have historically played a critical role in social change by making space for a diversity of voices and views.

Synergies between the arts and sciences, politics and the humanities, are strengthening movements calling for new ways of relating to people and the planet. This includes highlighting our ability to propose alternative practices, raise public awareness, and take political action in these times of crisis despite widespread apathy and political inaction. These emerging global movements of diverse peoples have taken the lead on climate change action and remind us that all life on the planet is interconnected, and that our actions, or inactions, impact everyone.

The discussion on 8 November 2014 will be followed by a week-long inaugural exhibition featuring the works of esteemed artists KG Ranjit and Ashmina Ranjit. This combined exhibition, which will end on 15 November, is an intergenerational interpretation of the climate change crisis. This event is designed to foster further dialogue between the arts and humanities and social sciences, and is part of a broader effort by the India China Institute to broaden debates on climate change in the Himalaya.

Artists’ Statement

‘Beyond Recognition’

For me love, compassion, social justice, equality, freedom are our rights as human beings. Living in harmony in our societies, our countries, and the world at large – are the most important aspects of life.

Our home planet – the Earth – is the only place in this universe that is able to cultivate the existence of the living being for thousands of years. Human beings were so bright and clever that they fostered various indigenous cultures, where nature, art and ecology integrated effortlessly in to ways of life. But realities have changed beyond recognition and only memories of these harmonious relationships remain. Natural culture and indigenous knowledge have been corroded by lopsided urbanism and synthetic modernity. Earth and existence are threatened by a hydrocarbon apocalypse. We seem to have forgotten the fundamental harmonies between humanity and nature that uphold our integrity and dignity.

The more radically we separate ourselves from nature to justify our modernity, the more we lose the ability to relate to our sustainable heritages. Because we have drifted away from nature and destroyed the eco-balance, we are insensitive to ecological limits and interdependencies. To address the ecological crisis at every level we must develop a new culture and an ecologically rational society.

In this work, my concern is neither focused on the trap of synthetic modernity nor the nostalgia of historical harmonies. It is about that liminal space where one is free yet not free – trapped yet unrestricted – the suspension between hope and despair, bliss and misery. In that space the culture evolving from the present socio-political/natural scenario is both reflected and recreated. In this manner, ‘Beyond Recognition’ raises questions about our values as human beings; character, honesty, trustworthiness, duty, and even our sense of beauty, and relationship to natural simplicity. (Ashmina Ranjit)

==================

Environmental Aesthetics of K.G. Ranjit

Krishna Gopal Ranjit is a well known senior artist with numerous exhibitions to his credit. His realistic landscapes, with their subtle portrayals of light and shade, are collected all around the world. In the current exhibition, his art takes a new direction. Dealing with the theme of environmental crisis, he has previously painted mountains without snow, trees without leaves, birds without feathers, and melting glaciers and drowning cityscapes.

Most of the paintings are characterized by a burst of light at the center. Dim somber colors dominate the margins; an artistic motif that was also present in his earlier realistic landscapes. What is different about the current set of paintings, however, is a radical shift away from the realist form. The lines blur, losing their rigidity, and the colors flow freely, creating forms that range from semi-abstract to abstract. Images of Buddha and other gods peep from under the semi-abstract shapes of the paintings. Such depictions symbolize hope slowly turning obsolete in a world teeming with the threat of earthquakes, floods, landslides and other environmental disasters.

At the same time, environmental crisis is not merely a natural problem for Ranjit; it is a political problem. This theme is well represented in the painting where the city structures of Nepal, Afganistan, Bhutan, China and other nations of the Asian continent are shown drowning under water. It suggests not only a natural tsunami, but also a political one that can sweep away monuments of history in a matter of minutes. The paintings in the current show pulsate with energy and movement; they seem to suggest that chaotic energies—both natural and political—are shimmering under the surfaces of everyday life. The paintings are not only aesthetic representations of the environmental disasters, but serve also as timely warnings to the human race about the deteriorating condition of global environment.

//