Three artists who have created works that capture this terrible reality have been chosen by the Siddhartha Art Gallery (SAG) to showcase their work at the 2nd Art Summit taking place in Dhaka between Feb 7 and Feb 9. The three artists are Hit Man Gurung, Nhooja Tuladhar and Sunil Sigdel.

“It is most certain that the plight of Nepalese workers flying abroad is not only the issue of Nepal but South Asia as a whole,” says Sangeeta Thapa, SAG’s curator, who is taking the artists to the summit. “Thus we came up with idea that we could actually impact all the artist from all over the world.” For the summit, Hit Man Gurung, a visual artist has chosen to go with a startling presentation: his installation piece features a coffin, the interior of which is lined with photographs of people who applied for visas to go abroad, and their visages have been almost effaced by calligraphy. The outside of the coffin is covered with tiny prints of the passports belonging to these applicants.

Noohja Tuladhar, a recent graduate of the Kathmandu University for Art and Design, has chosen to go with a short video. His documentary, Descen-ding into Shadows, features the rage felt by and the opinion of people regarding the murder of 12 Nepali migrant workers in Iraq eight years ago, in 2004. The video is made up of a series of interviews that the artist conducted with locals in Kathmandu. The interviews are then juxtaposed with reportage about the event, which was beamed by various news outlets around the world. And in the background plays the sounds from the original execution video.  

Sunil Regmi, a Pokhara-based artist, is showcasing three digital collages representing war. Regmi believes that no country lives an atomised existence and that injustice and suffering in one place matters everywhere around the world. He thus seeks to create works that capture the shared grief and humanity inflicted by outrage and tragedy. A powerful work that he will be taking along to Dhaka, ‘Last Moment of Life’, for example, shows the Buddha with a gun pointed at his head.

The Dhaka Art Summit is the world’s largest platform for South Asian art. Although this is only the second edition and it entirely addresses the issues of South Asia, works such as the ones that the Nepali artists will be showcasing will surely strike a universal chord.