“Transcending Boundaries”: Curating a Transnational Digital Exhibition
This fall, from 20 September to 21 October, 2020, the Yakpo Collective held our annual exhibition virtually, accessible through our site. Entitled “Transcending Boundaries,” the exhibition responded to the current crisis where technology has come to substitute our interactions with the world.
The digital nature of the exhibition motivated our theme and curatorial practices. This year has shed light on many conversations that need to be facilitated about what boundaries mean to us. From tangible boundaries of physical touch, to personal borders we set for ourselves which dictate feelings of identity and belonging, the exhibition surveyed the extension of this word. Transcending notions of geographical borders when thinking about the Tibetan experience, this exhibition provided a space for the artists to translate boundaries independent of this context.
Our team for the exhibition however did transcend literal geographic boundaries with collaborators from New York, the collective’s base, Kathmandu, and London. With the entire process of organization, promotion, and curation of the show held completely online, the Yakpo collective created our own curatorial digital spaces to come together.
With the accessible format of a digital exhibition, artists with diverse perspectives, methodologies, and aesthetic languages could submit their work. After the open call announcement on our social media platforms, we received an impressive response from creatives from the US, Canada, Europe, India and Tibet.
The exhibition was held in a three-dimensional virtual space and replicated the experience of moving around a physical gallery. We selected artworks in a multitude of mediums – painting, film, dance, graphic design, photography, and collage. The pieces were grouped into thematic clusters allowing the digital visitors to engage with the variety of interpretations by the artists of the theme.
Over the course of the exhibition we conducted interviews with some of the exhibiting artists to discuss and reflect on what boundaries mean to them, and how they have affected their experiences as artists.
Khenzom Alling describes transcending boundaries as a process for Tibetan artists to challenge the expectations of what Tibetan art is, and create new definitions of what Tibetan contemporary art can mean. In her two pieces in the exhibition, she takes the traditional Tibetan symbols that she grew up seeing and re-imagines them in her own works. Often existing and being educated in white Western-centric spaces, art is a way for her to reconnect with her heritage.
Wrath by Khenzom Alling
To choreographer and dancer Sonam Tshedzom Tingkhye boundaries represent both the external structural and geographic limitations she confronts as a woman and as a brown person in white-dominated spaces, and the internal personal boundaries she uses to protect and define herself. She says she created the piece “An Offering” in the exhibition to reconnect to her roots. Having just moved away from her family to a different state, the process of choreographing this work in a dance school where she was the only Tibetan, was a vehicle for her self-expression as an artist and an offering to the Tibetan community.
Kunga Choephel’s experiences as the son of an immigrant family reflect his interpretation of boundaries. His intimate and reflective films are a tool for him to explore his personal feelings and experiences and to narrate them to a wider audience through the engaging and accessible medium of film.
Phutsok Lhagyal Hogduntsang was born in Kongtsera, Kham Gyalthang and after attending TCV for 9 years immigrated to the US in 2008 with his family. As a migrant and self-taught artist – he is currently attending art school to further his training- Phuntsok interprets boundaries as a constant navigation of the realities and expectations of the US and his Tibetan community.
Tibetan Gothic by Phuntsok Lhagyal
To London-based artist Yangzom Lama, transcending boundaries means communicating through her artistic practice her personal experiences and values when isolated from a Tibetan community and navigating her diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in 2017 as a young artist.
Cat Buddha by Yangdzom Lama
Losang Gyatso, a well-established artist in the contemporary Tibetan art community, takes on a different interpretation of what boundaries mean to him. Gyatso in his work strives to universalize personal feelings and presumed ideas of Tibetan culture and identity. His piece “Clear Light Tara” strips away all the Tibetan and Indian cultural markers of a traditional thangka to her spiritual female essence of compassion.
Clear Light Tara by Losang Gyatso
Many artists, when discussing the experience of being part of a digital exhibition, talked about how it was a way for them to feel connected to a Tibetan community of creatives. The digital nature of the show presented the artists and the viewers the opportunity to transcend physical boundaries of isolation both geographical and mental and access or even circumvent previously inaccessible art worlds. Exhibiting beside artists from a diverse range of experiences and backgrounds served to both create a sense of shared identity and community and as a place for everyone to reflect and define collaboratively on the multiplicity of Tibetan identities.
With this exhibition “Transcending Boundaries”, the Yakpo Collective illustrated the diversity of the Tibetan community. The generational, geographic, and creative differences in the artist’s response to the theme have led us to reflect on our role in the Tibetan creative community. Bringing together such a multitude of experiences, this exhibition created a horizontal cyberspace for creatives to feel connected to a transnational community of artists that with its multiple definitions remains fundamentally Tibetan.
Finally, the Yakpo Collective would like to give a heartfelt thank you to the “Transcending Boundaries” exhibition honorary committee Sedon la, Isabella and Losang Gyatso la for their support, time and expertise that made this project possible.