For one, the Chancellor’s son is the award winner in the Contemporary Painting category, and that is perhaps the biggest controversy surrounding the first National Fine Arts Exhibition organized by NAFA.
Not to be confused, national exhibitions were held in the past but by Nepal Association of Fine Arts. But this was the first one done by the Academy since its establishment last year.
It was bizarre of Mainali to defend the controversy as “just because he’s a natedar doesn’t mean he can’t win. Maybe in the future, someone related to me might as well win.” The Judging Sub-Committee hasn’t even issued a statement to explain why and how they picked the awardees.
The catalogue only lists names of the Selection Sub-Committee and Judging Sub-Committee, and well, we got an awardee who is on both committees.
While accolades should be transparent and backed by strong reasons, I feel that awards shouldn’t be a priority at the national exhibition for the moment. Artist Dibesh Pradhan asked me why. He had a point that many international festivals and art biennales do give awards. So why not here?
Mainali stated that giving out “1st, 2nd, 3rd prizes would give incentives to artists.” True. But I didn’t see these incentives truly working.
To receive a national award is no joke. It would be one of the biggest achievements in any artist’s career.
However, most of the artists, including some well-known names, submitted artworks that had already been on different shows around the city in the years gone by. It was a sheer disappointment even though there were several works that I admire and respect.
It puzzled me.
Go through your storage, take out a sculpture or two, and hand them over to NAFA. If artists themselves haven’t put in enough effort to showcase new works, why should the national awards be of any importance? When no one has risen up to take the exhibition as a challenge, why give out awards as “incentives”?
Do artists not care? Or are they blaming the “system” that’s discouraged them to care? Is it just participation for participation’s sake? You could introduce awards once artists create works that they take pride in exhibiting and when transparency is truly assured.
The lame excuse that’s been repeated several times is “This is the first time.” Despite that, it was good to hear Mainali add that NAFA is considering accepting artworks only made in the last one year from the next national exhibition.
The same excuse was embarrassing when it came to the presentation and installation of artworks at the exhibition. What it turned out to be was a bigger version of the Varsha exhibition that NAFA held last year.
Cluttered and crookedly hung works on partitions that started right at the entrance of the building, the National Fine Arts Exhibition didn’t look as appealing as it sounded.
Pottery and sculptures lay on the floor when they should have been on pedestals. Artworks were lying around in odd corners, staircases and corridors. Some got good and big spaces while dozens of paintings were on the balcony.
The Chancellor of NAFA has had shows abroad in international arenas and is a famous Nepali painter. I would expect him to know how a proper exhibition is done with due respect and equal treatment given to all artworks. The bazaar-like environment of the exhibition was not what artists expected.
“We wanted to include everybody. We had little time and space,” shared Mainali. NAFA accepted all entries that came in, and each individual could submit up to two entries. Nonetheless, NAFA had a year to plan this, and they could have taken up Nepal Art Council and other galleries to install works in.
Yes, inclusion is important and opportunities should be open to all. However, if they want to include everybody, the national exhibition should have been called an art fair, and the best place would have been the Bhrikuti Mandap exhibition halls where everyone would have gotten a space.
The fair would have received a bigger audience and allowed greater exposure to artists who keep complaining that “the public takes no interest when it is us who have to go to the public and not the other way around.”
An annual art fair would be a milestone. On the other hand, for a National Fine Arts Exhibition to live up to its name as a prestigious platform, there must be application forms and an unbiased jury panel to select artworks. It should be an achievement for artists to be selected to participate.
I took along a friend the second time I visited the national exhibition. Someone with no art background and who has rarely been to art exhibitions in the city, he said, as we sipped tea later, “No one’s going to come the next time around if this is what a national exhibition has to offer.”
We talked about it and decided that it was not just the proper presentation of works, but the subject matter of the works itself that placed the exhibition so low.
Here, we’ve got to break our own bubbles of creating works that are safe and are the norm, because they have become stagnant and no longer create dialogues with viewers.
Artists need to think beyond their boundaries, and present works that have critical contents instead of making more of pretty landscapes and nude women in some form or the other. We have the potential, we should let ourselves grow.
The writer is the contributing arts editor at Republica.
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