“The-Lit: Exclusion Within” is an art exhibition organized in conjunction with the Darnal Award for Social Justice and NexUs/LASANAA to raise awareness about social justice and Dalit issues. The exhibition features five artist whose works give voice to marginalized community in Nepal. The exhibition highlights issues of social marginalization from the perspective of a variety of local artists who use artivism to give voice to the voiceless. Through a mix of art and dialogue the exhibit promotes public discussion about social justice and contributes to struggle against untouchability faced by Dalit communities in Nepal. NexUs/ LASANAA and the Darnal Award for Social Justice jointly organized a youth artist program on these issues on 23 rd of August 2016 as part of the Exhibition opening. The exhibition will continue till 14th Sept 2016
The exhibition at NexUs was inaugurated by Darnal Award for Social Justice recipient Mr. Raksha Ram Chamar on 14 th August and featured remarks from Stanford University Professor Larry Diamond, Indian economist Sukhadeo Thorat and National Endowment for Democracy (NED) President Carl Gershman. Below are the featured artists and their works statements from the Exhibition:
Manish Harijan
His works creates the multiple dialogues within the exclusion of the social structure. He picks up the issues of cast, religious supremacy and poverty. Working in a binary opposition like, he tried delivering the ideas of double statement of the society. These days he is working with the meaning of the objects that we used for our daily life purpose and its meaning for the marginalized community. His works creates the discourse and gives that to analyzed to the viewers and have a multiple dialogues within. The entitled work “Auspicious Suspicious” Installation work generates the idea about good fortune and faith with suspiciousness. The work share the notion of binary opposition which combined eastern auspicious natural grains food (religiously purified) with human skull. Individual skull have filled with each different natural grains food assumes as pure natural products used for religious purpose in eastern culture. Skull generally symbolize death, evil and negative power. Natural grains symbolizes religiously purified that strength to protect the life of society with its biological process that makes balance between negative and positive power of the society, faith and superstitions.
Aruna Hingmang
Aruna Hingmang is a well-established name in artist’s circle of Nepal. Aruna Hingmang is an artist coming from remote area of Nepal. She is a dreamer and has canvassed the dream of freedom of her community from caste bondage in paintings. However, she has deeper sentiments attached to the freedom of women. All of her paintings speaks to the story of women’s life connecting with different aspects of nature who advocates for caste and gender equality through her paintings.
Pramila Patiyar BK
Pramila Pariyar received her Master Degree in fine art since she is working an artist. She express the women suffering of the lowest cast of our society. She portrayed the issues of the low cast women and try to show how they became successful in the contemporary time using their own identity and suffering. She hopes that the earth is round that one day everyone had chance to prove their capacity of their own.
Poonam Kumari Das
Poonam Kumari Das is one of the Madhubani and Mithila fusion painter form Mahotteri, Terai region. She had an education of B.ED Health/ Population, political science. She had training from Indigenous fine arts center, social mobilization for 15 days. She is the recipient of National award 2073, Excellent Award folk arts 2012. She paints the story of women’s in the contemporary sense in Mithila and Madhubani style.
Ishan Pariyar
He has already done 3 solo shows in Seoul (Korea), Pokhara and Kathmandu (Nepal) and has been actively involved in art activities in Nepal and abroad. I prefer to work in social and environmental subjects. Because being a human everyone is concerned in the problematic situations and its consequence cause by human activities that are affecting our surrounding. Nowadays every term, every minutes and every each seconds are surrounded by bitter experiences. I have chosen bitter guard as a motif and symbolic representation of my idea. Its structure and color inspired me to paint in a theme of ‘Tito Satya’ (Bitter Reality).
In Nepali saying it reflects the bitterness, sense of unpleasantness and sourness of the life. I use mountains, local images & objects as to show my identity and the closeness to the environment I was been nurtured. The facts of my paintings are the ups and downs of life compared with the visualizations of the surrounding so my paintings are the visual realization of the life.
Source: https://lasanaa.org.np/2016/08/31/the-lit-exclusion-within-art-exhibition-going-on/