Transcending and Subverting Boundaries: Understanding the Dynamics of Street Art Scene in Nepal

Abstract

Nepali street art is the culmination and transcendence of the gallery-based contemporary art scene in the country. Street art critically engages with a larger audience in a context it was younger artists who gave initial impetus to the formation of street art scene in Nepal. This chapter looks at Nepali street art as a social product that embodies the interplay between the personal, on the one hand, and the political, on the other hand, as well as the interplay between the local and the global. The chapter demonstrates these dynamics of street art by surveying selected street art projects and through interviews with the artists concerned. Meanwhile, the chapter also provides a contextual reading of the emergence and evolution of Nepali street art.

Anyone travelling to Nepal through the country’s only international airport would first find themselves in Kathmandu, the sprawling capital city where there are as many gods as there are people, as the cliché goes. One with an observant eye and a curious disposition would perhaps also notice the visual culture that characterizes Kathmandu’spublic spaces. The visuals, one may observe, are not just out there. They speak to the audience without actually ‘speaking’ to them. The language is visual and the messages conveyed range from being subtle to in-your-face. From the commercial visuals to the political sloganeering on the city walls, different groups have used the visuals as a medium to reach out to the unsuspecting masses.

Taking cue from these visual practices, Nepali street artists launched a series of street art projects in 2011, months apart, declaring the start of a street art movement in the country. The deepening political uncertainty at the time (as a result of political differences over constitution-making that was underway in the then Constituent Assembly)¹ and the relentless use/abuse of public spaces by commercial and political interest groups with impunity provided a strong impetus for the street artists to intervene in the public spaces. This visual intervention in the public spaces was motivated by their desire not only to contest the commercial and political interests but also to communicate to the masses.

Street art historically evolved out of graffiti writing associated with vandalism. By the term ‘vandalism’, two interrelated things are to be considered. One concerns the intention of the graffiti writers and the other concerns the reception of their works. Graffiti writers, writes Lewison (2008), often want to ‘destroy’ the cities and make them uglier. They do not intend to communicate to the masses. On the other hand, since the graffiti writers prefer to use their own secret code or language, their works are largely incomprehensible to the masses (Ibid. 2008). Such works are therefore taken as acts of subversion and vandalism, more so because of their illegality in many places. Though street arts too may not enjoy the legal sanction, they however enjoy social and community sanction in most places (Ibid. 2008). Moreover, street artists not only seek to infuse the city with its aesthetics but also engage with issues that concern the city and thereby resonating with most city inhabitants.

Street art has now come a long way since its beginning as a subversive art form (Irvine 2012). While examples of graffiti could be traced back much farther into the past in different civilizations, graffiti writing as a movement started off in New York around 1970s as a subcultural movement. This movement soon paved way for the emergence of street art in the 1980s which was more at ease with the contemporary art forms unlike its predecessor (Waclawek 2008). By 1990s, street arts had already spread from New York to different cities of Europe and South America thanks to the advancement in communication media and technology (Irvine 2012). As urbanization scaled up across the world with the increase of population and international/internal migration fuelled by the labour demands of the expanding neoliberal regimes, street arts were no longer confined to a few world cities by 2000 but were visible in most cities around the world (Ibid. 2012).

In the context of Nepal, street art scene emerged in Kathmandu—one of the oldest cities in South Asia whose history dates back to 200 BC and is said to have been founded in 723 AD (Throndsen 1989 cited in Sengupta 2011). The ancient city of Kathmandu is now a vibrant city inhabited by diverse communities where markers of modernity remarkably co-exist with those of tradition. It is no surprise when these varied influences are reflected in the artistic productions in the city. This particularly holds true for street art, which has been evolving through our own social, political and economic contexts. Street art in Nepal has been a turf of young artists. As many fresh graduates from art schools fail to find entry into the exclusive zone of gallery-based contemporary arts scene, they find street art scene welcoming for their fresh ideas and approaches unconstrained by the conventional curatorial politics.

Nevertheless, the meaning of the term ‘street art’ has expanded over the years. Today, what we call as ‘street art’ encompasses stencil graffiti, modern graffiti, sticker art, art of intervention, artistic street installations and street poster art, among others (Alpaslan 2012). Street artists work with different mediums, materials, techniques and styles. Street art is clearly a broader category that includes different graffiti forms. However, this is not to suggest that graffiti no longer exists separately. Graffiti forms continue to co-exist with street art and are often mistaken for street art by those who are not aware of their respective histories. The distinctive feature of a street art is that the street artists use urban space as an open gallery and the masses as an audience. It has unmistakably anti-institutional and anti-commercial biases while being critical of the existing political culture.

Nepal is not the only country where street art received impetus from the political change or tensions. In Egypt, for example, street arts first became visible in the cityscape as a protest graffiti coinciding with the Egyptian revolution in 2011 (Gröndahl 2012). This morphed into a full-scale street art movement following the regime change triggered by the revolution (Ibid. 2012). As it was not possible to paint critical street arts during the rule of President Hosni Mubarak, his fall from power opened up a floodgate of self-expressions among the street artists in Egypt (Ibid. 2012).

The use of street walls to challenge the powers-to-be is not unknown in South Asian Region too. The art protest movement started by Pakistani street artist Asim Butt in 2007 is a case in point. While mural painting in public spaces has a longer history in Pakistan, Butt’s intervention in the urban street walls to oppose the declaration of emergency by the military was particularly remarkable. His work, particularly the ‘eject symbol’, which called for the ouster of the military, quickly caught on and became a part of the pro-democracy movement in the country.

As street art seeks to directly engage with the people while visually contending the dominant narratives of commercial and political interest groups in the public spaces, street art is—in this sense—always political even when street artists themselves may refuse to believe so. Turner and Webb rightly note that “Because art locates people in all their particularities and complexities, and most importantly, in their materiality, in a material world it is perhaps reasonable to assert that art is always at some level politically engaged: it always locates itself in a time and space, and responds to the local material context” (Turner and Webb 2016: 15). If this is true for ‘art’ in general, this is undoubtedly truer for ‘street art’ in particular because of its direct engagement with the material world. Irvine writes, “Street art inserts itself in the material city as an argument about visuality, the social and political structure of being visible” (Irvine 2012: 4, Italics in the original). Here, one should not lose sight of the role of the street artist. The personal merits as much attention as the political; the failure to do so could lead to a deterministic understanding of one completely dictating the other. Using some ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills 2000), one could say that the personal is always in-the-making shaped by the larger structures of society. Hence, the personal and the social are always implicated into each other.

In this chapter, I attempt to analyse Nepali street art as a particular art form which embodies the interplay between, on the one hand, the personal and the political, and on the other hand, the local and the global. I look at street art as an art form where both aesthetical and political aspects of art come together. I maintain that street art is a social product shaped by the larger structures of society, economy and politics within which a street artist is located. Having said so, the agency of street artists can be located in their urge to communicate to the masses and thereby change the status quo. I seek to demonstrate this by discussing the themes of the street art projects carried out by three major art collectives in Kathmandu: Artudio, Sattya Media Arts Collective and Artlab and also by, drawing upon my interviews with the representatives of each collective: Kailash Shrestha (Artudio), Rupesh Raj Sunuwar (Sattya Media Arts Collective), Kiran Maharjan (Artlab) and Dibyeshwor Gurung (Independent artist). Towards the end, I attend to the questions of production and consumption of street arts with reference to globalization.

Sociology of Art: Insights for Understanding the Context of Nepal

Sociologists in particular, writes Bourdieu, have an uneasy relationship with artists for the former wants to banish “artists from the history of arts” (Bourdieu 1993: 139). In other words, sociologists tend to belittle the role of artists and give primacy to the social context to analyse a work of art. However, Fuente (2007), after having reviewed the latest trends in the sociology of art, declares the inauguration of the ‘new sociology of art’. Unlike the ‘old’ sociology of art that undermined the aesthetic properties of art, the new sociology of art shows commitment to take account of aesthetic attributes of artworks in keeping with social constructionism (Ibid. 2007). Long before Fuente (2007), DiMaggio (1983) saw sociology of art ‘coming of age’ with the publication of Janet Wolff’s Social Production of Art in 1981 and Howard Becker’s Art Worlds in 1982. The publication of these books, DiMaggio writes, “vanquish the ideology of artistic genius and internalist accounts of progress in art; provide a wealth of insight into the production of art; and suggest (Wolff explicitly, Becker by example) the manner in which we should approach art’s sociological study” (1983: 273–74).

Wolff (1981) reminds us that art is ideological in nature for it carries the values, ideas and beliefs as espoused by the artist who himself is located in specific social and economic structures. Zangwill (2002) who is against the whole project of sociology of art nevertheless makes a valid point that aesthetic is not antithetical to the ideological aspect of the arts rather the latter ‘piggybacks’ on the former. According to Wolff (1981), the ideological nature of art is mediated by the prevailing aesthetic codes and conventions. However, these aesthetic codes and conventions are also historically constituted and hence, Wolff writes, “there is nothing sacred and eternal about the aesthetic, which a sociology of art profanes; on the contrary, sociology demonstrates its very arbitrariness in laying bare its historical construction” (Wolff 1981: 141). Since Wolff clarifies that her concept of ‘art’ used in the book is more or less generic inclusive of various art forms which are united by the fact that they are all a social product, one can safely extend Wolff’s idea to argue that street arts in Nepal too have strong ideological elements, as they are no less of social product, which are expressed through the aesthetics of the street arts. According to Allan Schwartzman, street artists aim to “communicate with everyday people about socially relevant themes in ways that are informed by aesthetic values without being imprisoned by them” (Allan Schwartzman quoted in Gleaton 2012: 15).

While all street arts are located in a particular time and space, their implications are not circumscribed by geographical and temporal boundaries owing to the forces of globalization and advances in technology. While some denounce globalization as a cover for capitalism and imperialism, there are others who see huge potentials in globalization and welcome it as a force that can lead to modernization, democratization and progress. Kellner (2012) advocates a critical approach to globalization that suggests globalization per se is neither entirely oppressive nor entirely progressive. While acknowledging that there are oppressive aspects of globalization-from-above characteristic of corporate capitalism, Kellner brings to our attention that globalization-from-above is always accompanied by globalization-from-below which allows marginalized and vulnerable groups to use the institutions of globalization including new technologies to pursue democratization and social change.

In the context of street art, globalization has enriched the artistic palette as artists now have access to a wider pool of ideas to draw upon. In a way, globalization has liberated artists from the intellectual and conceptual boundaries imposed by the nation-state. Street arts are constantly experimenting, innovating and presenting before us works that are not just local or national or global. Hence, Nepali street art scene need not have parallel elsewhere for any movement feeds on the dialectics between the local and the global. Nepali street art scene is therefore unique in its own way and therefore merits serious scholarly attention which seems to be lacking at present.

Particular Amidst General: The Emergence of Street Art in Nepal

One may locate the antecedents of the Nepali street art scene in the developments of Nepali contemporary art scene in 1990s. Novel art forms like installation, performance art, video art and so forth emerged in the contemporary art scene in Nepal in the decade of 1990s. These new art forms that emerged in 1990s, Uprety (2010) notes, were the result of the larger processes of economic liberalization, globalization and reinstatement of democracy in the country. The period was also marked by boom in media sector with the unprecedented increase in the number of private media outlets in the country. Meanwhile, there was a spike in the number of art galleries in Kathmandu accompanied by a greater movement of Nepali artists outside the country for exhibitions and residencies. All these played a significant role in shifting the contours of the contemporary art scene in the country.

Turner and Webb (2016) characterize the 1990s as the decade when the very frameworks for art were being re-conceptualized at the global level owing to the rise of Asian art in general. In the case of Sri Lanka, the decade of 1990s saw significant changes in the contemporary art landscape. This has been attributed to the arrival of younger Sri Lankan artists in the visual art scene against the backdrop of the then civil war and rapid urbanization (Weerasinghe 2005). These young artists experimented with new ideas drawing on their immediate milieu and lived experiences (Ibid. 2005). Thus, to quote Perera, “they ruptured both artistic conventions and ideologies prevalent up to that time as well as redefined the meanings and politics of dominant aesthetics” (Perera 2011: 11). While visual arts in Sri Lanka took explicitly political turn in 1990s, it was only in 2000s that Nepali painters began to explicitly infuse politics into their artworks even though the fusion of politics and arts was already prevalent in other artistic pursuits like poetry, dance, drama and so on.

Ashmina Ranjit was one of the earliest contemporary artists who explicitly tried to bring politics and arts together in the country. When Ashmina returned from Australia after finishing her BFA in 1999, she realized that there was a pronounced lack of conceptual and critical evaluation of artworks and that the art was primarily driven by aesthetic considerations (Bangdel n.d.). Moreover, she was also struck by the conscious detachment of art from politics in the country (Ibid. n.d.). Her foray into the contemporary art scene was therefore driven towards bringing change in art perceptions in Nepal. After the turn of the century, one could observe an explicitly political turn in the visual art scene in Nepal. In 2003, a number of artists came together including Ashmina Ranjit to establish an art collective called SUTRA. In its five-years of existence, the collective organized several exhibitions and workshops with an aim to influence public thinking about arts.

In 2007, Ashmina Ranjit founded LASANAA as an alternative art space through which she sought to challenge the conventions of Nepali art including the way it was perceived. She advocated for ‘Artivism’ (meaning the reconciliation of art and politics) which was evident in her performance art and installations. The regime change in 2008 and the subsequent developments prompted a major shift in the visual art scene in the country. As the country became republic in 2008 triggering a new phase of political transition, it provided a conducive socio-political context for the proliferation of politically motivated art works. Contemporary artists like Arjun Khaling not only took membership of a political party but also pushed his political agenda in his art works (Kunwar 2014). This explicitly political turn in the contemporary art scene in the decade of 2000s heralded the emergence of street art in Nepal over the following decade.

The street art scene in Nepal started off in Kathmandu around 2011. At the time, there was a remarkable surge in street arts in the city. From my personal experience, I remember the boundary walls of the Himalayan Hotel in Kupondole in particular would often catch my attention as I used to pass by that street almost every other day. Some distance away towards Thapathali, a mural depicting a giant Red Panda on the wall of a building facing the Thapathali bridge would also unfailingly draw my attention. Such encounters with street arts while going around the city sparked an initial interest in me on street arts, for they appeared to me as a powerful visual form of communication.

Street art, as it is conventionally understood, has barely a decade-long history behind it. This being said, there is a much longer history of religious murals in the country. The history of religious murals goes as far back as mid-fifth century during the Lichhavi Period (Subedi 1995). The murals which decorated the walls of temples and monasteries of that period had even impressed the then Chinese Emperor Wang hsuan-tse to the extent that he praised them as great artworks (Ibid. 1995). No religious murals of that particular period exist today and only inscriptional evidences of their existence have been found. However, some centuries-old religious murals still exist on the walls of a number of very old temples and monasteries in the country such as the Shantipur temple in Kathmandu and Jampa Lhakhang monastery in Upper Mustang among others.

In contrast, the street art scene that emerged after the turn of the century was largely influenced by the Western street art scene. It all started with a series of pieces by Invador, a French artist whose mission was to ‘invade’ the cities through his creative pixel designs, appeared in different parts of the city walls in 2008. However, it was not until 2011 that the street art movement as such began to take shape in Nepal. Foreign and Nepali artists using pseudo-names like Bruno Levy, Yeti, Rainbow Warrior and Mr. K made the initial interventions in the visual landscape of the city. Their street arts laid the ground for the beginning of street art movement in Kathmandu. Kailash Shrestha soon took the baton forward by launching a street art project called ‘We make the nation’ in the same year. Shrestha, whose aim was to be a mere ‘banner artist’ as a child growing up in his remote village of Dolakha, went on to attend an art school in Kathmandu. Upon graduation, he founded Artudio in 2010 as a space for like-minded artists to come together and share their respective works. Frustrated with constant political deadlocks and the increasing ‘visual pollution’ spread by political parties and businesses in the city, Shrestha decided to take to the streets not by organizing strikes but by registering a visual protest in 2011 painting on the boundary walls of Hotel Himalaya in Kathmandu.

We initially wanted to paint the walls of Ratna Park in Kathmandu and so accordingly, we approached the concerned authority. However, our requests went unheeded. We then reached out to the Hotel Himalaya asking if they would allow us to paint on their boundary walls that faced the streets. They agreed as soon as we put across the idea. In this way, using whatever few resources we had, I along with some friends launched our first street art project which also happened to be the first street art project by Nepali artists.²

As a medium of expression, street art gained popularity in the country also because of its better accessibility for both the artists and the audience. Irvine writes, “Street art thwarts attempts to maintain … ‘non-art’ space and the institutional regime controlling the visibility of art” (Irvine 2012: 25). Nepali street artists are also not supportive of the controlled visibility of arts in the institutional spaces which are often exclusive to younger artists as well as to those whose works do not fit into the existing conventions. Younger artists who have just graduated from art schools have difficult time to break into the contemporary art scene. They lack access to avenues to display their artistic skills and talent. The street artists, I talked to, admitted that they wanted to show that the gallery scene did not hold the monopoly in the display of arts. Kiran Maharjan, a member of the art collective ‘Artlab’, joined the street art scene following his failure to get his works accepted by the commercial art galleries.

Right after I graduated from art school, I looked for avenues to showcase my works. I approached several galleries and art shops but the owners did not show any interest in my works. This experience then prompted me to bypass the galleries and take my works directly to the masses through street art. Moreover, I was already involved in the skateboard scene in Kathmandu which has affinities with graffiti culture. All these later led me to street art.³

It should be noted that galleries are also commercial spaces. Such spaces, according to Becker (1982), operate through a network of people consisting of producers, distributors, dealers, promoters and critics among others. It is their co-ordinated activities facilitated by their common interest in art and their agreement on what constitutes ‘art’ enable the art world to function. By placing arts in everyday surroundings, street art has not only problematized the conventional place of art but, following Papastergiadis (2010), one may say that it has also transformed the authority of art by bringing it closer to the masses. Bourdieu (1993) reminds us that one requires some cultural capital as a means to appropriate arts. Such cultural capital, according to Bourdieu, is not accessible to the bulk of the population. According to Bennett et al. (2010), it is the educated middle class and elites who are likely to frequent art galleries and it is they and their children who are likely to develop knowledge about arts and thereby increase the cultural capital at their disposal.

Bourdieu (1993) underscores the role of education in cultivating ‘taste’ for artworks. He likens the educational qualification to the title of nobility through which comes certain dispositions like patronizing museums and galleries and so on. By taking arts to the streets and thereby to the ‘untrained’ public who were not supposed to lay their eyes on arts in the first place, Nepali street artists like their counterparts in other parts of the world have defied the conventions of art production and consumption. Rupesh Raj Sunuwar who started off as a painter moved to street art scene after he was emotionally affected by the massive destruction caused by the massive earthquake of 2015 in Nepal.⁴ As he wanted to spread a positive message to the people in distress, he painted a mural with a theme ‘We will rise again’ following which he got connected to ‘Sattya Media Arts Collective’. Sunuwar was of the opinion that street art democratizes ‘art’ significantly (Fig. 9.1).

Arts are not just for the expatriates who can afford to buy and hang them on the walls of their fancy living rooms and offices. An artwork should not be taken merely as a decorative item rather it calls for serious engagement. This engagement is possible only in the street arts where people encounter arts in their everyday life.⁵

Fig. 9.1

Mural by Rupesh Raj Sunuwar. (Photography by Binit Gurung)

The Personal and the Political: Locating Aesthetics in Street Art

While it is quite apparent that the works of the artists are shaped by the prevailing socio-political and economic issues, the agency of the artists can be located in the intentionality of their artworks, which manifests in the contents of their artistic expression. Stating that arts are expressive in nature, Dewey (1994) likens objects of arts to languages. He writes, “Each art has its own medium and that medium is especially fitted for one kind of communication. Each medium says something that cannot be uttered as well or as completely in any other tongue” (Dewey 1994: 211). Street art therefore is a unique art medium in which the personal and the political come together. As the personal and the social are implicated into each other, the personal doesn’t necessarily mean ‘private matters’ of an artist.

Following Mills (2000), it may be useful to bring up the distinction between ‘troubles’ and ‘issues’ in relation to street art. Mills insist that the ‘troubles’ are private matters of individuals which they can address themselves from within their milieu whereas the ‘issues’ are matters of public concern which pose threat to the values cherished by a large number of people in the society. As street art is a form of visual language to communicate to the masses, what is expressed by the street artist is not his private ‘troubles’ but the ‘issues’ that most people can relate to. The personal that prevails in street art is the self of the artist that is moulded by the society. On the other hand, the political is the expression of the street artists which maybe confrontational or instructive serving to bring certain issues to prominence and influence public discourse about them. Shrestha, in one of my extended conversations with him, explained to me that it was his surroundings that would mostly influence the content of his street arts.

What goes around the city is what reflected on the walls of the city. Street art can be a personal expression of the artists but it is ultimately social because we are communicating with the society about something most people can identify with.⁶

Dewey makes a similar point when he writes, “the material out of which a work of art is composed belongs to the common world rather than to the self, and yet there is self-expression in art because the self assimilates that material in a distinctive way … The material expressed cannot be private … But the manner of saying it is individual” (Dewey 1994: 212). What is distinctive about street art is, writes Irvine (2012), its direct engagement with the city. He explains, “The artists and the works presuppose a dialogic relationship, a necessary entailment, with the material and symbolic world of the city” (Irvine 2012: 10). It is this very dialogue that Shrestha sought to make explicit when he initiated his street art project.

At the time of starting our street art project, I was also annoyed by the advertisement banners and hoarding boards that cluttered the urban space. I could see that this indiscriminate onslaught of commercial and vested political messages/information in the public spaces was making people visually insensitive and uncritical in their thinking. I wanted people to think about current issues critically and not take things for granted. To that end, we believed no other medium can reach out to the masses as effectively as street art.⁷

The intentionality of the street artist aiming to break the status quo is out-and-out political. However, we should not lose sight of the question of aesthetics here. For many, the political edge in art comes at the expense of aesthetics as if both cannot co-exist. This line of thinking comes from a view on “art as a second reality alongside the world in which we live day to day, rather than as one of the powerful social instruments for the creation and maintenance of the world in which we live” (Donald Preziosi quoted in Turner and Webb 2016: 16). Kemal and Glaskell (2000) note that politics, aesthetics and arts could co-exist together in a meaningful relationship. This is also how most street artists in particular would like to view their works. Street artists in Nepal aspire for aesthetic depiction of their ideas on the city walls and thereby speak to the masses. Following Irvine (2012), one may say that street art ‘de-aestheticizes’ ‘high art’ and meanwhile ‘aestheticizes’ the hitherto non-art spaces like the city walls. This itself makes street art political in nature.

Though individuality is not overlooked in street art, many street art works in Nepal have been projects where different artists came together and worked out their ideas in a team before translating them into visuals on the city walls. Artudio’s I’M YOU project led by Shrestha was a case in point. Under this project, they painted man, objects, human apparition with the words ‘I’M YOU’ in different parts of the city to urge people to think critically and not take anything for granted. They basically wanted to convey to the people that they all were connected and shared enough common ground to make collective actions. In one of their notable art works under the project, they painted activist Dr. Govinda KC in a sitting posture with the caption I’M YOU. Dr. Govinda KC is a well-known orthopaedic surgeon and a professor of orthopaedics at Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu. The particular artwork in question emerged in the context of Dr. Govinda KC’s repeated hunger strikes since 2012 to protest against the irregularities in the medical sector such as political appointment in national medical institution, exorbitant fees for medical education, undue universities’ affiliation given to private medical schools lacking adequate infrastructures and the unholy nexus between medical mafia and politicians among others.⁸ By painting Dr. Govinda KC’s portrait on the wall, Artudio artists wanted to communicate to the people that his fight against the irregularities in the medical sector is indeed a public cause that should concern all Nepalis. By lending support to Dr. Govinda KC’s activism instead of sitting on the fence, the artists have taken “on the challenge of the political in their work” (Turner and Webb 2016: 16).

Turner and Webb rightly note that “artists make work as responses to the events that have touched them, that have crossed their paths and their consciousness” (Turner and Webb 2016: 17). This is exemplified by the works of street artists in Nepal. The Kolor Kathmandu street art project done by Sattya Media Arts Collective in 2012 is a case in point. Under this collaborative project, the artists painted a little more than 75 murals in all the 75 districts of the country, each of them depicting a unique identity of the place. The artists were critical of the urban consumer culture which, they believed, made Kathmandu not only ugly with all the commercial sign boards but also disconnected the capital city with other largely rural parts of the country. The aim was therefore to connect the capital city with the rural far-flung districts of the country with artistic imagination. The project was also an initiative on the part of the street artists to reclaim public spaces from the political parties which have long been taking liberty with public spaces, virtually monopolizing them with their political slogans. The attempt to reclaim the city by the street artists itself is a political act. Molnár aptly notes, “The real political significance of street art lies not so much in the direct political messages carried in the artwork but in the very practice of street art itself” (Molnár 2011: 9).

As a part of Kolor Kathmandu project, Dibyeshwor Gurung painted a mural in Baluwatar, Kathmandu depicting the transformation of urban landscape due to rapid urbanization in recent times. It depicts the implications of urbanization and rapid migration of Nepali youths outside the country. Gurung in this noted mural wanted to highlight the mess that characterized today’s urban landscape which could only be smoothened if the youths stayed back in the country. As someone who had spent some years abroad, the mural certainly represented fragments of his own experiences of leaving the country. His experiences and observations in the city were not entirely his. They were also shared by people in the city to a varying extent. However, Gurung was of the belief not all people would be receptive to the ideas depicted on the street walls. As street arts are placed in public spaces, they attract attention of people from different walks of life and some might even take offence. Though Gurung never experienced direct hostility because of his works, he nevertheless remained wary of such a possibility. Aesthetics, according to him, plays an important role to add nuances to the ideas that can be politically blunt.

When I want to project something that is politically sensitive or controversial, I make sure I do not translate my ideas explicitly in my works. Some people in the streets can take exception to certain political works and hence, may create obstructions while working. Therefore, one needs to have a nuanced approach in projecting political ideas of potentially controversial nature.⁹

Artlab, a Kathmandu-based art collective which specializes on street arts, first launched a street art project called ‘Prasad’¹⁰ in 2013 which raised the issue of labour migration and brain drain to foreign countries. Under this project, they painted over-sized portraits of national figures in public spaces not only in the capital city but also in other cities like Birjung, Pokhara, Beni, Dharan and Tansen with an aim to inspire the local youths to stay back and contribute to the society as per their capacities. By painting murals of mostly non-political figures, the artists appeared to have avoided touching upon the contemporary political issues. Kiran Maharjan, for one, believed that a street artist needed to have mainly ‘street art aesthetics’. However, Turner and Webb remind us that “whether artists choose to focus on their own aesthetic and maintain a distance from sociopolitical concerns, or engage energetically in current troubles, they are part of the culture, and in presenting a particular set of images and attitudes, will necessarily reflect something about the lived world” (Turner and Webb 2016: 15). By encouraging people not to succumb to the culture of migration through their works, the street artists working under the ‘Prasad’ project are implicitly politicizing what appears as personal. In practical terms, it is impossible to draw a clear boundary between the personal and the political in the realm of street arts. Rather, street art embodies the interplay between the personal and the political (Fig. 9.2).

Fig. 9.2

Mural by Dibyeshwor Gurung. (Photography by Binit Gurung)

The Local and the Global: The Production and Consumption of Street Arts

Street artists in Nepal have not only represented the local issues and themes pertinent to the everyday life of the people in their surroundings but they have also raised issues of global concerns which may have direct or indirect impact on the lives of the people at the local level. The depiction of urbanization, depletion of environment and haphazard pursuit of development among others are themes of global significance and relevance which the Nepali street artists have depicted on the city walls. The street artists may draw on ideas and styles originating in other parts of the world but all their imports are tempered by local experiences and concerns.

The colours I’m using are not produced here, the paint brushes were imported from some other country, the techniques and styles were invented elsewhere too. If the use of foreign materials make an art less Nepali or non-Nepali, there cannot be a truly Nepali art in today’s interconnected world … I was inspired by not only by foreigners and their works but also by my own tradition and religious murals of the past. Besides, I was very much influenced by our own philosophical movement like Thaha Movement.¹¹

The Nepali term ‘Thaha’ refers to a state of ‘knowing’. The Thaha movement led by Rup Chandra Bista (1934–1999), in the second half of the twentieth-century Nepal, emphasized on the need to develop criticality in perception and thinking. To that end, Bista experimented with new ideas and approaches while assuming several roles in his life as a teacher, a local administrator and a political activist among others (Baral 2014). As a teacher, he experimented with initiatives like labour-based education, informal education and education for girls in his community (Ibid. 2014). As a VDC chairperson, he established development-oriented institutions like Palung Bikas Samiti, Bikas Ghar and Bikas Bari (Ibid. 2014). As a political activist, he practised and advocated for a people-centred politics under the influence of communism (Ibid. 2014). Bista mainly encouraged people to cultivate critical awareness and knowledge about one’s milieu as a means to achieve social justice and development.

Shrestha from Artudio believed that art can help develop this criticality as advocated by Bista. Similar observation has been made by Papastergiadis when he writes, “the critical work of art is related to its ability to expand the contours of perception and experience” (2010: 19). The expansion of perception, experience and thinking is also aided by the globalizing forces which have spared no region in today’s times. Globalization has both supporters and detractors (Kellner 2012). However, it would be erroneous to characterize globalization with broad brushstrokes typical to each camp. While globalization transforms the local culture or practices to an extent owing to the influx of new ideas and practices from elsewhere, globalization is still not a juggernaut that destroys the local culture and tradition completely. Rather, all local cultures are adept at picking up elements from outside culture without posing threat to their own tradition. Nepali street artists capitalize on globalization while being critical to it. Their works are informed by both the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ perspectives.

The spread of Internet and wireless technology around the world has facilitated interactive communication in real time. This has allowed street artists in one part of the world to get in touch with fellow artists in other parts of the world and be abreast of each other’s latest works. Many street artists travel to different cities around the world and work independently or in collaboration with the local artists. Italian street artist Riccardo Ten Colombo, for example, collaborated with Sattya Media Arts Collective in the aftermath of the great earthquake of 2015 to do a street art project in Kathmandu. Together, they painted coloured equilateral triangles, as a symbol of strength and resilience, on the walls of those structures destroyed by the earthquake. Similarly, French visual artist Julien de Casabianca’s Outings Project launched in 2014 brought him to Kathmandu after the earthquake. The Outings Project is driven by the idea that the arts confined to the museum spaces should be made available for the wider audience. To that end, Casabianca employs street art and has brought images out of the local museums to public spaces in various cities of the world. Considering the loss suffered by people of Nepal due to the recent earthquake and people’s unshaken faith on god, Casabianca pasted a large image of Mahākāla, an old painting of a deity, to the side of the building where Artudio is housed. Casabianca believed that the deity could be a source of hope and courage to some onlookers (Fig. 9.3).

Fig. 9.3

Mural by Julien de Casabianca. (Photography by Binit Gurung)

An example of similar exchange in the South Asian region is the collaboration between Indian street artist Shilo Shiv Suleman and Pakistani women’s rights activist Nida Mustaq in 2015 to work on Fearless Pakistan project which took them to cities like Karachi, Rawalpindhi and Lahore in Pakistan. At a time when the issue of women’s security in public and private spaces was being discussed in India and Pakistan, they wanted to make murals with the theme of fearlessness depicting the stories and experiences of Pakistani women. To that end, they organized interactive workshops for the local women and engaged the latter thoroughly in the process of making murals in different cities. In all these instances, we could see that the ‘local’ figures prominently in every street art project even when the artist in question is a foreigner. Irvine rightly notes, “A street work can be an intervention, a collaboration, a commentary, a dialogic critique, an individual or collective manifesto … Whatever the medium and motives of the work, the city is the assumed interlocutor, framework, and essential precondition for making the artwork work” (Irvine 2012: 3).

The works of foreign street artists have not always gone down well. There have been instances when the visiting artists were not sufficiently sensitive to the local context or worse, paid no attention to the historical and religious significance of the local structures. One such instance was when Franco-British street artist Seb Toussaint and French photographer Spag came to Nepal with ‘Share the Word’ project to work in the slum located on the banks of the Bagmati river at Teku in Kathmandu (Thapa 2014). Though Toussaint’s initial plan was to paint in the slum by engaging the slum dwellers, he wrapped up his project by painting the facade of a nearby nineteenth-century Shiva temple in multiple colours (Ibid. 2014). This triggered an uproar in the art community in Nepal which particularly put the Nepali street art artists in a tight spot raising ethical questions around the practice of street art for the first time in the country. Recalling this incident, Shrestha criticized Toussaint for his insensitivity and the younger Nepali street artists in particular for not having a sense of history. Shrestha gave premium to a proper sense of history and tradition in street art. His I’M YOU project was motivated by the same belief where he wanted to talk about local identity in a global context.

We often talk against imitating other culture but then, we forget our own identity and tradition. Our education system is shallow. Our history is uncritical and we often take it for granted. Art can be a critical way of talking about identity and history. For example, we painted Karuwa¹² in the streets of Tansen in Palpa district because Palpa is known for its Karuwa but youngsters are not aware of that. We made the intervention to remind people of their local identity without which we lose our unique identity in today’s globalized world.¹³

Webb (2005) celebrates globalization pointing to its ability to reinvigorate tradition. It is the hallmark of all dynamic cultures to take in ideas from other cultures as much as necessary without threatening their own traditions (Ibid. 2005). However, every tradition is syncretic in the first place (Gellner 1997). In the context of Nepali contemporary art since 1990s, what contemporary artists are doing are not just local, national or global. Their works are rather informed by a mix of ideas, symbols and images drawn from different cultures. Commenting on the emerging novel art forms since 1990s, Bangdel writes, “a new movement towards experimentation, social engagement, and socially-conscious alternative art practices often served as reactionary voices that responded to local issues” (Bangdel 2017: 60). By the late 2000, Nepali street artists, many of whom were trained in art schools in Kathmandu, built upon these developments in the contemporary art scene even while breaking away from it to enter the hitherto non-art extramural spaces.

However, it would be naive to assume that people perceive the street arts the way the street artists wanted them to. The street artists, I talked to, shared that they were not much bothered when people understood their works differently. Dibyeshwor would find it amusing whenever people randomly approached him with their interpretations of the mural which he painted at Baluwatar in Kathmandu. This would not have happened, he argued, if the encounter between his art and the people had happened inside a gallery. Maharjan admitted that the artist would lose the ownership of his art once it was there in the public domain. However, he maintained that one needed to have ‘street art aesthetics’ to make it visually appealing and meaningful. Otherwise, the work would be meaningless and perhaps ugly (Fig. 9.4).

Fig. 9.4

Mural by Artlab. (Photography by Binit Gurung)

If aesthetical value seeks to evaluate arts, aesthetics of street art serves to differentiate between what may be considered the real street art/artists and the lay ones. By stressing that one needs to have a sense of ‘street art aesthetics’ to be a street artist, one can sense an existence of kind of a gate-keeping mechanism in place in the street art scene even though street art is theoretically open to anyone who can paint as the public space is owned by no one in particular. For Becker (1982), the question of aesthetics is not some abstract question but it is something that has real consequences in the form of allocation of rewards and opportunities. What rewards and opportunities can a street artist possibly have? There have been cases of street artists cosying up to commercial enterprises in clear contradiction of its anti-commercial spirit. Some street artists in the West like British-artist Banksy and American-artist Shepyard Fairey among others are also commercially successful and have been featured by contemporary art galleries and museums. Such contradictions are not lost on street artists.

Despite its short history, Nepali street art is clearly growing and seems to be moving gradually towards commercialization. Artlab, which Maharjan is affiliated to, now focuses exclusively on street art and commercial graffiti “due to its high demand in the market”, as Maharjan would say. As more owners of restaurants and hotels in the city are increasingly interested in having their spaces painted with colourful murals and graffiti, offers for commissioned works are no longer difficult to come by. The street artists also work with a variety of NGO/INGOs and embassies based in Kathmandu. While Nepali street artists are aware that the commercial turn in street art can go against the very spirit of street art, they also argue that opportunities for commissioned works are in fact important for them to sustain themselves professionally in the city. They also justify their commercial stints as a way to fund their non-commercial art initiatives. Besides doing some funded projects and commissioned works, Nepali street artists have continued wrestling with the social and political issues. Some street artists not only switch between commercial and non-commercial works as and when needed. They also freely traverse across the boundaries between the contemporary gallery scene and the street art scene, thereby blurring the boundaries altogether.

There have also been instances of collaboration between the street artists and the government in executing street art projects in South Asia. Street art groups in Delhi like St+Art India Foundation and Delhi Street Art, for instance, have worked with Delhi government agencies to paint on the walls of public institutions/structures. Such co-operative relationship has obviously contributed towards gradual mainstreaming of the street scene in the city. Wherever the visibility of art is tightly controlled within the walls of institutions, street artists paint surreptitiously in the streets evading the attention of the authorities. In the case of Nepal, the local authorities do not give permission to paint in the public spaces but they do not go about stopping anybody from painting the public spaces either. When private properties are involved, the artists in question often take prior permission with the property owners before painting their walls.

However, street arts are ephemeral in nature. They may wear off naturally over time or could be removed by local authorities or property owners any time. The competing political graffiti of the political parties add to the ephemerality of the street art in Nepal. However, the artists also capture images/videos of their artworks and share them in different social media platforms. Art collectives like Artudio, Sattya Media Arts Collective and Artlab regularly archive their street arts in the form of images and videos in their Facebook pages, Instagram, blogs and websites.¹⁴ Though several works done by the artists in the past no more have physical presence, people still continue to encounter them in the online media. This has somewhat contained the temporality of street art and has further democratized its consumption.

Conclusion

One cannot appreciate the street art scene in Nepal without taking into account the contexts of its emergence. The developments of the contemporary art scene in 1990s in Nepal and elsewhere in South Asia and beyond entailed significant reconfiguration of the very conceptualization of ‘art’. In the case of Sri Lanka, the contemporary art during the period embraced the personal and political sentiments of the artists for the first time ushering in a fresh breath of air in the contemporary art scene in the country. Nepali contemporary art in the 1990s saw the coming of many new art styles and forms like performance art, video art, installation and so forth which expanded the contours of Nepali contemporary art landscape. The liberalization of the economy, the reinstatement of democracy and the context of globalization provided conducive environment for the contemporary artists to go beyond the established conventions of Nepali art. This soon led to an explicitly political turn in the contemporary Nepali painting in the 2000s.

The changes in the contemporary art scene in 1990s paved way for the development of street art scene in Nepal over the following decades. While building upon the developments in the contemporary art culture in the country, young street artists attacked the elitism of the gallery-based contemporary art scene which was exclusive not only to them but also to the ordinary masses who supposedly did not hold the cultural capital to consume art works. Nepali street art received impetus not only from the developments within the contemporary art scene but also from the economic and socio-political contexts of the country, not to mention the trends prevalent in the street art scene beyond its nation-state boundaries. The themes taken up by Nepali artists were not dissimilar with the themes taken up by their counterparts in other parts of South Asia and beyond. Be it Egypt, India or Pakistan, the common thread connecting the street arts in all these places is their conversations with the prevailing social, political and economic issues via the city walls which function as the open canvases.

As is apparent, street artists are ever-vigilant members of the society who are abreast of the prevailing social, political and economic issues of the country and beyond. Being a member of society, artists are also located within the larger structures of politics, economy and society. Hence, artistic ideas are not independent of the existing social and material conditions. However, a deterministic reading of arts by reducing them to the social and historical contexts in which they were produced would fail to explain the important role of the individual artists. It is true that individual artists often draw on their personal experiences while making art. However, the personal is always in the process of being shaped by the society. The personal and the social are therefore implicated into each other. One is not subordinated to the other, rather both are mutually inseparable.

The street art projects described in this chapter show that the artists were motivated by their belief that that they could make some difference via street art. By taking arts to the public spaces, the street artists are making a political statement in a number of ways. First, the practice of street art is in itself political. Breaking away from the gallery scene, Nepali street artists have introduced arts to the hitherto non-art spaces. To quote Papastergiadis, “when art challenges the boundaries by which we understand the aesthetics of the everyday, and combines this experience with a new understanding of connection to our surrounding world, then it could be argued to have expanded the sphere of politics” (Papastergiadis 2010: 19). Second, the contest for visibility in the public spaces with commercial and political interest groups lends street art a political edge. Third, the visuals laced with social and political connotations make street arts political in sentiment because they are aimed to provoke people into thinking. Hence, street art is an art form which embodies the interplay between the personal and the political. This relationship is mediated by the aesthetics of street art which facilitates and constrains the practice of street art.

Since communication with the masses is at the heart of any street art initiative, a street art is not an expression of personal ‘troubles’ of the artist but an initiation of a dialogue related to some public ‘issues’ that most people can easily identify with. Instead of passively resigning to the public ‘issues’, in the Millsian sense of the term, they tend to make artistic intervention in the public spaces. While artists cannot possibly change the world through art, they can however employ art to “protest against injustice, war, racism, oppression, human rights abuses, environmental degradation, cultural loss, poverty and all forms of discrimination and exploitation” (Turner and Webb 2016: 16). The agency of the street artists can be located in their intentionality to change the existing state of affairs.

As discussed above, Nepali street artists position themselves in their own tradition and culture while appealing to the global discourse. They have engaged with a range of issues like environmental degradation, animal conservation, urban consumerism and so forth which are also the issues of global concern. Even though their works are physically located in a particular time and space, the images of their works pass across the nation-state boundaries freely in the world of Internet which helps to contain the ephemerality of street arts and democratize its consumption. The online archiving and sharing allow street artists based in different parts of the world to give their local arts a global audience. Street art becomes an avenue where the local meets the global mediated by the intentionality and experiences of the artist rooted in a particular time and space. One could safely conclude that the street art scene in Nepal is characterized by the interplay between, on the one hand, the personal and the political and on the other hand, the local and the global. This is quite evident in the street art projects surveyed in this chapter.