Shadow Circus

Since the Communist Chinese invasion of 1949, Tibet has been a country under occupation. The exhibition SHADOW CIRCUS revisits an overlooked chapter in the recent history of Tibet: the armed struggle for freedom that spontaneously erupted in response to the Chinese aggression, which then became entangled in global geopolitics when the CIA got involved in 1956. Code-named ST Circus, it was one of the CIA’s longest running covert operations until it was abruptly abandoned in the late 60s.

Filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam researched the subject for many years and made a BBC-commissioned documentary – The Shadow Circus: The CIA in Tibet (1998) – that focused on the CIA’s support and betrayal of the Tibetan freedom fighters. They were inspired by Tenzing’s father, Lhamo Tsering, one of the leaders of the resistance and the key liaison between the Tibetans and the CIA.

SHADOW CIRCUS re-evaluates the audiovisual material that they gathered over the years, and for the first time presents a re-edited version of their documentary, along with photographs, documents, letters, CIA surveillance maps of Tibet, and excerpts from interviews with former CIA agents and guerrilla operatives.

The Cold War epoch is navigated within a third space, as an ‘uneasy alliance’ beyond the geopolitical power blocs and bilateral relations to examine forms of intelligence gathering, guerrilla warfare and clandestine resistance in Tibet, that continues to resonate today as part of an unfinished project of freedom.

The filmmakers foreground the subjective position of an intermediary between the CIA and members of the Mustang Resistance Force: Lhamo Tsering, whose personal archive is staged to confront the complexities of an occupied terrain, wherein individual aspirations and national interests fail to provide a symmetrical historic trajectory.

The unresolved nature of the militant image and its ethics of circulation become points of potent inquiry during this pivotal time in Tibet’s armed liberation movement and the international ‘alliance building’ that included one of the most networked intelligence services in the world. The ultimate betrayal of the Tibetan struggle by the CIA was a foregone conclusion but the deeply personal and lasting emotional bonds that formed between Tibetan resistance fighters and their CIA trainers in the course of their brief and unlikely encounter muddies preconceived notions of power relations and demands another line of inquiry.