Project Types: Installations

A project by Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam

in collaboration with Natasha Ginwala

 

After the Communist Chinese invasion of 1950 and its subsequent takeover in 1959, Tibet has been a country under occupation. Since then, resistance to Chinese rule, both inside Tibet and in exile, has been unyielding and resilient, transforming over time in response to the changing situation in China and the shifting winds of geopolitical alignments. But little is known of the guerrilla war that was fought from the mid-1950s to 1974 when thousands of Tibetans took up arms against the invading forces of China, a movement that became entangled in global geopolitics when the CIA got involved.

The CIA’s involvement in the Tibetan resistance started in 1956, at the height of the Cold War. Codenamed STCIRCUS, it was one of the CIA’s longest running covert operations until it was abruptly abandoned in the late 1960s when US foreign policy pivoted to find accommodation with China. The resistance collapsed in 1974 when its last stronghold in the mountain kingdom of Mustang on the Nepal-Tibet border was shut down by the Nepalese army. This chapter of recent Tibetan history has been largely forgotten, partly due to its clandestine nature and partly as an instinctive act of omission on the part of official Tibetan narratives, which, from the 1970s onwards, sought to highlight the essentially non-violent nature of the freedom struggle.

In the early 1990s, filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam started to research this story for a documentary film. They were inspired by Tenzing’s father, the late Lhamo Tsering, one of the leaders of the resistance and the key liaison between the Tibetans and the CIA. As an archivist and mapmaker, Lhamo Tsering recognised from the beginning, the vital importance of maintaining a record of the resistance in order to guard against its erasure from historic memory. Along with the guerrilla fighters whose activities he oversaw, he chronicled the struggle as a daily reality in the hostile geography of Mustang, photographing everything from training procedures to communal exchanges and religious festivities. These photographs, along with documents, letters and maps that he collected over the years proved indispensable when, in his later years, he wrote a monumental eight-volume history of the resistance.

The exhibition, SHADOW CIRCUS, is an attempt to unshackle and shed light on what anthropologist and historian Carole McGranahan calls, “arrested histories of the Tibetan resistance army”. It re-evaluates Lhamo Tsering’s personal archive in conjunction with the audio-visual material that Ritu and Tenzing gathered over the years, and includes a re-edited version of their 1998 documentary – The Shadow Circus – to create a more complete and complex mosaic of this still largely unknown story. A hand-drawn guerrilla training manual in Tibetan by an unknown resistance artist that Lhamo Tsering saved becomes a vital entry point into choreographing this archival ensemble. The Cold War epoch is navigated via a personal journey that transcends the calculated alliances of geopolitical power blocs and sheds light on the human dimension of intelligence gathering, guerrilla warfare and clandestine resistance deployed in the service of an unfinished freedom struggle that continues to resonate today.

The inaugural version of SHADOW CIRCUS was curated by Natasha Ginwala and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung with assistant curator Krisztina Hunya. It was co-produced by and exhibited at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin from 7 February to 10 March 2019, within the programme of the 14th Forum Expanded, 69th Berlinale.

 

EXHIBITIONS

SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 7 February–10 March 2019

Art Gallery, Kamaladevi Complex, India International Centre, New Delhi, 20 April–1 May 2022

5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Invitations Programme, 12 December 2022–10 April 2023

Experimenter-Colaba, 27 July–26 August 2023

Tibet Museum, Dharamshala, 13 October–31 December 2023

School of Art & Aesthetics (SAA), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), 15 February–15 March 2024

Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation (LAMO), Leh, 9 August–9 October 2024

 

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.

 

Presented by Artspace, Sydney, 52 ARTISTS 52 ACTIONS, an ambitious, year-long project running from January 2018 to January 2019, highlighted artistic practice across Asia. The project engaged 52 artists and collectives to stage actions in unique, physical locations throughout the region and share them with global audiences on Instagram and online.

Our action, CHRONICLE OF AN ARREST FORETOLD, is a part of our continuing work examining the colonial dismantling of Tibetan language and identity currently taking place in Tibet. It highlights the plight of shopkeeper and language advocate Tashi Wangchuk who is currently serving a five-year sentence for ‘inciting separatism’.

“The local government is controlling the actual Tibetan culture, such as the spoken and written language. It looks like development or help on the surface, but actually the goal is to eliminate our culture.” – Tashi Wangchuk

https://www.instagram.com/52artists52actions/

https://52artists52actions.com/

 

The one-channel video installation weaves together vignettes from the everyday life of Namdol Lhamo, an anonymous exile living in Brussels who happens to be one of the famous Singing Nuns of Drapchi, a group of nuns imprisoned in Tibet in the early 1990s for peacefully demonstrating against Chinese rule. Namdol Lhamo’s sentence, along with that of her companions, was further increased when they were discovered to be secretly recording protest songs in Drapchi Prison and smuggling the tapes to the outside world. She spent a total of 12 years in prison.

Co-commissioned by Contour Biennale 8
With the kind support of the Gujral Foundation and Argos Centre for Art and Media

Exhibitions:

Contour Biennale 8, Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium,
11 March–21 May 2017

Kunsthalle Vienna, How to Live Together, 25 May–15 October 2017

Marabouparken Art Gallery, Stockholm, Mouth Shut, Loud Shouts, 15 September–3 December 2017

Buddhist Film Festival of Europe, Amsterdam, September 2017

Art Alive gallery, New Delhi, You Will Know Me: Migration Stories, 19 January–20February 2020

 

 

 

 

Stark, frontal portraits of former political prisoners from Tibet – young, old, lay and religious – are intercut with images of unrest and police brutality from the Lhasa uprisings of March 1988 and March 1989 and set to haunting music by the English composer, Julian Stewart Lindsay.

A single-channel video installation, which explores the rarefied world of Tibetan Buddhist debate. Built around three sets of debates dealing with the basic Buddhist concepts of impermanence, lack of self-existence, and dependent-arising, the piece allows the viewer an opportunity to participate in this unique dialectical practice while highlighting its relevance to the modern world.

Exhibitions:

Tibet Pavilion
1 June to 7 September 2013
Venice, Italy

Ravenna Festival
7 to 11 July 2012
Ravenna, Italy

2010 Busan Biennale
Living in Evolution
12 September to 20 November 2010
Busan, Korea

The Kaleidoscopic Eye:
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
4 April to 5 July 2009
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
For more information: www.mori.art.museum

Shooting Back, 6 June to 28 October 2007
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna
For more information: www.tba21.org

This multi-channel video installation unfolds around a comprehensive and multifaceted discussion on the Tibetan question, setting the “Middle Way” approach of partial autonomy within China against the demands for total independence by the activist community. The film fragments interweave scenes from recent Free Tibet activities with interviews with members of the Tibetan community in exile in India, and Chinese intellectuals engaged with the Tibetan question who confront their own spiritual and political engagements.

Exhibitions:
A Question of Evidence, 28 November 2009 – 5 April, 2010
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna

March 2009 marks the 50th anniversary of the takeover of Tibet by Communist China and the flight into exile of the Dalai Lama and nearly 100,000 of his countrymen. Today, the Tibetan diaspora is spread out across the world, and actively upholds its traditions and culture, even as they come under increasing threat in own land. What does Tibet mean for the exile Tibetans, most of whom have never seen their country?

A Tibet of the Mind is part of a larger work that examines the current Tibet situation and the Dalai Lama’s dilemma in trying to resolve it through peaceful means. In this piece, several exile Tibetans, old and young, and including the Dalai Lama, speak directly to camera about the first thing that comes to their mind when they think about Tibet. The results are frank, moving, surprising and challenging in unexpected ways.

Exhibitions:

Exile, 16 May to 30 August 2009
Art Centre Silkeborg, Denmark

Man and nature work as one to create a traditional cow house in the North Indian Himalaya. Built of mud, stone, slate and bamboo, the emerging structure is imbued with centuries of tradition and wisdom, and highlights the natural aesthetics of a building that is in harmony with its surroundings.

Shown at:
Engadin Art Talks, Zuoz, Switzerland
27 August 2011

Landings: Extracted Bodies and Self-Cartographies
StudiumGeneraleRietveldAcademie, Amsterdam
14 March 2013

This video redeploys recently acquired Chinese police footage of a large-scale raid on a small village in Central Tibet, converting it from a security apparatus archival record to a parody of what Communism means today in Tibet, and by extension, in China. Hundreds of armed police, paramilitary forces, attack dogs and armoured vehicles make a dawn raid on a sleeping village and make house to house search-and-arrests of suspected Tibetan nationalists, rudely awakening terrified men, women and boys. Accompanied by a stirring rendition of The East is Red, the video is edited like a scene from a war movie, intercut by propaganda text from the well-known Communist Chinese opera, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, one of the eight officially approved plays during the Cultural Revolution.

Exhibitions:
Burning Against the Dying of the Light
Solo Exhibition, Khoj International Artist’ Association Studios, New Delhi
10-31 December, 2015

The title of the installation reflects on Dylan Thomas’ poem, Do not go gentle into that good night, with its refrain “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” While Dylan Thomas’ poem was an exhortation to his dying father not to die without a fight, this work examines the self-immolation protests in Tibet as part of a continuing struggle to prevent the light of an entire civilization from dying out.

A number of these fiery protests have been captured on mobile phones and secretly made available to the outside world. This act itself is punishable by long prison sentences. The hurriedly shot videos bring home in graphic and horrific detail, the physical reality of self-immolations. To witness a living human body engulfed in flames is a truly distressing and disturbing sight. But what right do we have to turn away our faces when the very point of such a public protest is to draw our attention to the cause they represent?

The Wheel of Light and Darkness
(mixed-media sculpture: metal, printed material and tablets)
This sculpture is in the form of a large rotating Buddhist prayer wheel. But unlike a typical Buddhist prayer wheel, it consists of its bare armature, ringed by metal bars. Rolls of religious text lie exposed at its heart. Embedded in a circle around its skeletal circumference is a number of tablets, each screen playing videos of the self-immolations as they were originally filmed. The prayer wheel is both a tribute to the courage of the activists and a grim reminder of the cause they died for – the slow disappearance of the very essence of their identity and culture. As in a traditional prayer wheel, each revolution of the wheel strikes a tiny bell, its sharp ring dispelling ignorance and sending out a message of hope and peace.

Funeral #1
(single-channel video, approximately 8 minutes)
This video follows the self-immolation and cremation of Ani Palden Choetso, a Buddhist nun who burnt herself on 13 November 2011 on a street corner in Tawu town in Eastern Tibet. Video footage subsequently smuggled out of Tibet shows her standing stock still, engulfed in flames, before collapsing. Later, a crowd gathers and prevents security officials from taking her body away. Her funeral is held at the local monastery where thousands chant prayers and hold a sombre candlelight vigil. Two days later, a hurriedly filmed mobile phone video shows the monastery under attack by armed forces. After this event, the authorities cracked down on performing funeral ceremonies for self-immolators.

Funeral #2
(single-channel video, approximately 8 minutes)
This video follows the self-immolation and cremation of Jamphel Yeshi who set himself alight during a peaceful demonstration in the heart of the Indian capital, New Delhi, on 26 March 2012. He died in hospital two days later. His death had the effect of galvanising the exile Tibetan community and elevating him to the status of a hero. The video starts with footage of Jamphel Yeshi in the crowd of demonstrators minutes before he set himself alight. It is followed by images of his self-immolation and footage of his funeral procession and cremation in Dharamshala, witnessed by hundreds of distraught Tibetans.

Two Friends
(single-channel video, approximately 10 minutes)
Two friends, Ngawang Norphel, 22, and Tenzin Khedup, 24, both former monks, took a vow to die together. On 20 June 2012, carrying the banned Tibetan national flag and shouting independence slogans, they set themselves on fire on a busy street in Trindu town in Eastern Tibet. Mobile phone footage captures their dramatic sacrifice. While Tenzin Khedup died on the spot, Ngawang Norphel was carried by monks to the local monastery. He died more than a month later in a Chinese hospital. While in the monastery, burnt beyond recognition, he talked on camera to the monks attending to him. This exchange – as he laments the situation in Tibet that led him to take this extreme action and asks after the welfare of his friend – poignantly conveys the urgency and desperation of how people in Tibet perceive their situation.

Nets in the Sky, Traps on the Ground
(mixed-media: video, printed material)
A series of Orwellian phrases taken from official Chinese documents that describe some of the many control mechanisms and restrictive measures aimed specifically at Tibetans will be projected on the walls and ceiling. Text from official documents outlining these policies will be displayed. These present a more comprehensive picture of the draconian laws that Tibetans live under, which don’t exist anywhere else in China. They will be complemented by before-and-after satellite images of rural areas transformed in line with the “New Socialist Villages” programme currently underway in Tibet that graphically demonstrate the extent of social engineering taking place in the region.

Last words
(mixed media: video, printed material)
Some of the final messages left behind by the self-immolators – both handwritten and as audio recordings – will be displayed and presented. These statements, sometimes matter-of-fact but often poetic and deeply philosophical, explain the reasons for deciding to burn themselves. In their mix of Buddhist compassion and political awareness, they provide a compelling insight into the unique nature of the Tibetan self-immolations.

Exhibitions:
Burning Against the Dying of the Light
Solo Exhibition
Khoj International Artist’ Association Studios, New Delhi
10–31 December, 2015

Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium
Contour Biennale 8, Mechelen, Belgium
11 March–21 May, 2017