NEPALI POWER
2022 - Painting (Painting)
3 panels, each: 248.92 x 116.84 cm
Köken Ergun and Tashi Lama
Nepal and China signed an agreement for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2017. The BRI is a strategy that was set forth by China in 2013 to expand its influence by building a network of economic corridors around the globe. BRI projects in Nepal include the Kathmandu-Kerung Railway, the Galchhi-Rasuwagadhi-Kerung 400 kilovolt transmission line, the 762 megawatt Tamor hydroelectric dam, and the 426 megawatt Phukot Karnali run-of-the-river hydropower project. NEPALI POWER is a collaborative project by Köken Ergun and Tashi Lama composed of three vertical paintings that raise questions about the BRI’s infrastructure projects, critically considering both the positive and negative impacts the initiative will have on Nepal. This triptych of paintings is inspired by traditional Tibetan thangka painting, in which Lama is trained. The painting on the left is an impression of the Kathmandu-Kerung Railway project, while the painting on the right predicts how Nepal might export electricity to the greater region of South and Southeast Asia. The environmental and human repercussions caused by the construction of the BRI’s projects are portrayed in the details of both paintings. A third painting, in the middle of the triptych, vertically states the phrase “NEPALI POWER”. This third painting co-opted the language of propaganda rhetoric, while implicitly questioning whether the BRI initiative will move forward or not. In Ergun’s complimentary collaboration with Indian YouTuber Satyam Mishra, Ergun opened his extensive research archive on the BRI to different YouTube content creators around the world. He asked them to produce short YouTube commentaries using materials in Ergun’s archive, as well as other materials and footage they found from different open sources on the internet. The resulting YouTube videos comment on different aspects of Chinese-led projects in Nepal, ranging from the Kathmandu-Kerung Railway to various hydroelectricity projects that might shape a different future for Nepal in the region.
Since the early 2000’s artist Köken Ergun has been devoted to a transnational artistic practice, in which shifting identities of specific social groups in given contexts embody grand narratives of the world economy and new nationalist ideologies. His videos and installations are led by his exploration into how globalization has conditioned new forms of cultural identities. Ergun is particularly interested in different worlds being formed amongst non-dominant communities, such as the large global Filipino diaspora, or the global and regional networks of exchange and dominance established by various mid-size powers. Trained in the Tibetan thangka painting tradition, Tashi Lama has mastered this ancient genre. Connected by ancestry to Tibetan cosmology, the artist employs the possibilities of his technique to comment on his surrounding reality. Spatial dimensions and temporality in thangka painting have the capacity to interconnect celestial dimensions with earthly dilemmas. They encapsulate a sense of representing a totality and are thus allegorical of real and supernatural phenomena, geological and celestial. They are operatic in their symphonic glory, and therefore a stage on which to represent the world and human conditions.
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