Ordinariness

muskan

June 12, 2023, 1:08 p.m.

KATHMANDU, FEB 05 – The walls of the National Art Council’s second floor draw away from you, as you encounter sharp contours and bright colours—warming up a dull Kathmandu afternoon. The shapes and shades are part of a series of paintings on flex, by artists Shradha Mukhiya and Subesh KC, aptly called Prelude, a faint reminder of TS Eliot’s sketch of a world made up of decadence. In the large geometrical shapes—

rectangles, squares, triangles, circles—in bold colours, inspired by the Cubists, you see a fragment of the sky’s blue and sometimes, black. It is a sky torn by Kathmandu’s latest flaunts—the high-rise buildings. In some, it’s half an eye’s view of the sky you might catch a glimpse of, if you stood somewhere amidst the squalor and looked up.

Mukhiya and KC’s exhibition is titled Ambitions of Ordinariness in its entirety. The next section draws you to a small centre with work done in symmetrical lines. On one wall hang the images of the Ganesh and the Shiva linga, existing only as lines. The adjacent wall has a set of pages with lines running across them—some running astray after following a perfect course, some getting tangled in a jumble at the centre and some just flowing away like waves. “Like our constitution,” Shradha says.

An entire wall is devoted to work that brings to mind small realities. “Oh Decadence, You are so beautiful!” it says, and you know of little things like beauty, memories of moments that are sometimes transitory.