Shortly after Anton Chekhov formulated the narrative principle now known as “Chekhov’s gun” – if there’s a gun on the wall, it must eventually fire – Andrei Bely unleashed petersburg, a 1916 novel about turn-of-the-century terrorism, whose parricidal plot unfolds to the ticking of a bomb ignominiously concealed in a tin of sardines. The question is never whether the device will explode, but who will it destroy when it does?
Karan Shrestha’s solo exhibition ‘Apparatus in Play’ was imbued with a similar tension, a nervousness that resists commitment to a particular form. Just as Bely draws the comparison between the terrorist bomb and a city on the verge of social eruption, the works of Shrestha speak of Kathmandu as a metropolis threatened with collapse from within. The city itself is surrounded by mountains, so the horizon does not appear as a straight line, but as an irregular progression of peaks. The artist exploits this ready-made metaphor with a central installation composed of four video works, each encapsulating its own type of chaos. Projected onto an entire wall, an uncertain horizon, 2017, spins the Nepalese capital in swirling images from a handheld camera of the city projected onto an entire wall. The anchor for this dizzying imagery was a small monitor built into the same wall. It featured a son, 2014, a portrait of Kathmandu Central Market in Asan Square. Here, Shrestha’s lens remains steady, her focus unwavering; all traffic is internal to the scene, as streams of pedestrians face rickshaws, motorcycles and open-back trucks.
On the floor were two monitors. A Featured Chobar, 2016, which contrasts idyllic images of tourists, pilgrims and schoolchildren by a river with grim shots of the man-made waste that now covers these same banks. The other monitor featured a one-minute clip from a popular Nepalese film, Ta Ta Sarai Sapris Badri (2013). In the clip, a man cowers on the ground while another points a gun at him. Suddenly a third man appears to press a gun to the second man’s head, then a fourth, a fifth, and so on, until there is a long chain of would-be killers wielding handguns, guns, swords, and even a very big stick. The effect is clearly comical, the acting appalling, but at the same time, all it takes is a helping hand, a shaking finger, to set the whole queue on fire.
But the drawings, rather than the moving images, were the bulk of the show. The most ambitious of them, especially the colossal in these folds, 2019 – suspend a myriad of narratives in a kind of incomplete calcification of national myths, portrayed with an unease that never quite settles on the page. This visual nausea haunts all of the artist’s work. With all of his experiences across media (from a sculpture made out of grains of oats and wheat, to digital photographs, to a pair of sandwich bricks growing an outstretched little arm), one has a sense of practice. of the artist like a collage without glue.
This effect benefited the last video of the exhibition, the nearly seven-minute video hundreds more flowers, 2020. In 2007, as part of Nepal’s attempt to rebuild itself ideologically, the country instituted a new national anthem to replace its former monarchist tribute. Jump from anthem to anthem with the groundbreaking pop-tinged 1978 song “Gaun Gaun Bata Utha(Rise Up from Every Village), Shrestha created a soundtrack for a sequence of propaganda film fragments. Images include documentation of religious rituals, police brutality and the 2015 earthquake; excerpts from music videos; historic painting stills; and scattered other images ranging from a young runner finishing a race, to protesters being buffeted by water cannons, to a body being unceremoniously fished out of a muddy river. Ricocheting from humor to heartbreak, the film ends with schoolchildren singing the new anthem, their assembled selves a vision of the “hundreds of flowers” that make up the nation’s future. Even with this note of optimism, Shrestha paints Nepal as a country whose breath is still held for the next upheaval.
