In Person: Tale of a City with Jagadish Upadhya
For the eighth episode of In Person we speak with Jagadish Upadhya at the exhibition Tale of a City recently on view at Siddhartha Art Gallery, Kathmandu. The exhibition featured eight artists—Abhishek Shah, Anil Ranjit, Jagadish Upadhya, Rupesh Man Singh, Sharmila Shrestha, Sujan Dangol, Ashesh Dangol and Jattadhari Bhajan Kala—working with multiple mediums: pen and ink drawings, photographs, video, and rice straw art. With a focus on the city of Kathmandu, the artists responded to the rapid urbanisation of the Kathmandu Valley by celebrating an idea of the city that is true to their respective experiences of living in it.
The show brought together the artists’ works as a collective movement, with a special emphasis on the city as a place of mysticism and spiritualism. This is evident in the work of artists from Film Foundry, as they pay homage to symbols of worship from Khokana by using a silver gelatin emulsion on Lokta, or Nepali handmade paper. Similarly, Ashesh Dangol and Anil Ranjit’s work also focuses on Kokhana, a small settlement on the outskirts of Patan. Sharmila Shrestha’s work explores life through the analogy of seeds. Sujan Dangol depicts the nostalgic mysticism of Kathmandu through sketches in black ink. He portrays spiritual figures within the landscape of the Kathmandu Valley which he grew up seeing. The recurring motif of the circle is Dangol’s nod to the lunar calendar, which is more commonly used for rituals and rites of passage. While the works in the exhibition are all imbued with sense of loss, they seek to reconcile a spiritual past with a modern, secular present. Placed in an ambivalent state between the two, Tale of a City can be seen as a process to find a way for both to co-exist. In the conversation, Upadhya talks about the hypocrisy of how indigenous knowledge systems are being erased, yet are simultaneously touted as the “new way of life” by the same late-capitalists that participate in this erasure.
Jagadish Upadhya is a photographer based in Kathmandu who practises strictly with film. He is the founder of the Kathmandu based collective Film Foundry, which operates as a studio for processing film as well as offers workshops and practical training in film-based photography. Upadhya believes in fusing different techniques—experimenting with various alternate printing methods to express his practice and lifestyle as one. He keeps his practice alive by capturing people in their daily lives and the festivities of his hometown, Kathmandu—a glimpse of which we see in this exhibition.
(Featured Image: Installation view of Mystic Kathmandu I-IX. Film Foundry. Image courtesy of Siddhartha Art Gallery and Film Foundry.)
Streamed live on 25 November 2021.
To read more about Film Foundry, please click here and here.
In case you missed the previous episodes of In Person, you can watch the most recent ones here, here and here.
