Sarah Magnatta

Traditionally, Tibetan artistic depictions of the Dalai Lamas highlighted the lineage of the master teacher, emphasizing the legitimacy of the institution’s rule rather than a close likeness of the individual man.  Today, an explosion of multifaceted imagery of the current and Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, showcases a recognizable international figure.  Different audiences, media, and contexts for his image coincide with the leader’s shifting role in the political, social, and religious spheres.  His portrait (and access to that portrait) has changed as well, largely due to the introduction of photography, the internet, and social media.  This presentation will explore several images of previous incarnations and the current Dalai Lama, evaluating both intended functions of the imagery as well as audience reception.

How do we acknowledge the role of sacred art or artifacts in a religious tradition while allowing secular visitors to interpret them from different points of view? How do we work with school groups around these objects? What emotions, controversies, or misunderstandings might arise; conversely, what learning opportunities do sacred objects provide?

Artist Tenzing Rigdol references Tibetan self-immolation in two very different works. The large-scale black-and-white painting Kirti: From the Ashes of Agony (2011) is a narrative of disruption.  A self-immolator on the left side (Tibet) causes varied reactions on the right side (exile) of both shock and indifference. In contrast, My World Is in Your Blind Spot (2014)—five brightly-colored collaged panels with silhouettes of buddhas in meditative postures—is a contemplative composition honoring those who sacrificed. This essay examines the two different approaches by Rigdol, an artist navigating self-immolations occurring in Tibet while living in the Tibetan diaspora.

In 2011, artist Tenzing Rigdol transported over twenty-four tons of soil from Tibet into the exile Tibetan community of Dharamsala, India, for a temporary installation—a site-specific work—titled Our Land, Our People. The exile community walked on, held, and sometimes ingested the soil (a clear marker of the importance of this work to this particular audience), the soil signaling the would-be permanent home of the audience. Despite the increase in global site-specific works over the past decades, few of these projects have navigated the issue of temporality as it relates to audiences in exile communities. By evaluating Rigdol’s contribution through the lens of site-specificity as theorized by Miwon Kwon, this essay shows how Our Land, Our People expands the site-specific paradigm as it challenges notions of what makes art site specific; it proposes diasporic communities—communities with implied temporality and often tenuous relationships to their current homes—can serve as the foremost component of the work. I also propose Rigdol’s Our Land, Our People breaks with the conventional label “contemporary Tibetan art,” the phrase currently used to describe art created in Tibet and in exile spaces. Our Land, Our People is primarily in dialogue with one audience in particular—the exile community in Dharamsala.

From exhibition catalog
Rauschenberg: Reflections and Ruminations
Published by the Museum of Outdoor Arts in conjunction with its presentation of the exhibition: Rauschenberg: Reflections and Ruminations

Exhibition and catalog produced for the Museum of Outdoor Arts

The visual construction of a landscape by an artist might take into account lighting, material, and recognizable scenery, but these images can also serve as markers of identity, especially for artists living in exile or in a harsh political climate. The contemporary Tibetan artists consulted for this paper (both living in Tibet and elsewhere) address questions that arise when thinking about landscape imagery and Tibet, an already controversial place whose name conjures various definitions. What is real and what is imagined in these place/landscape images? How does the placement of the work in a gallery factor in to the reading of the scene? How does the title work in conjunction with the content to challenge tropes? How does the specific viewing community or space change the narrative? This paper uses the notion of place as an organizing lens through which to navigate identity and identity constructs in contemporary Tibetan art.

Memories can be fractured, incomplete, or unreliable, but materiality—especially for artist Suchitra Mattai—often embodies stability. As Joanna Sofaer notes, “Materiality conveys meaning. It provides the means by which social relations are visualized, for it is through materiality that we articulate meaning and thus it is the frame through which people communicate identities.” Mattai’s use of specific materials denotes certain relationships, concepts, and questions, even while drawing from imprecise personal memories. She investigates her own family’s history—one that started decades prior as Indian indentured laborers in the British colony Guiana (now Guyana)—through these materials: personal tokens such as her mother’s and her aunt’s saris reference women of the South Asian diaspora, long decentered, but whose voices are here amplified; found needlepoint reclaims its status, eschewing the hierarchies imposed by colonial narratives dividing fine art from “women’s craft;” patterned paper and fabrics in the Tommy Bahama vein reference the ongoing exotification of the Caribbean by western consumerist culture; and sugar, the seemingly benign substance responsible for numerous acts of colonization, human enslavement, and the depletion of environmental resources, reminds the viewer of the ongoing ramifications of imperialism. This essay examines some of these materials—from “raw” to readymade objects and fabrics—as they intersect with memory in Mattai’s work, allowing us to, in Mattai’s words, “unravel and re-imagine historical narratives.”

In 2011, artist Tenzing Rigdol transported over twenty-four tons of soil from Tibet into the exile Tibetan community of Dharamsala, India, for a temporary installation—a site-specific work—titled Our Land, Our People. The exile community walked on, held, and sometimes ingested the soil (a clear marker of the importance of this work to this particular audience), the soil signaling the would-be permanent home of the audience. Despite the increase in global site-specific works over the past decades, few of these projects have navigated the issue of temporality as it relates to audiences in exile communities. By evaluating Rigdol’s contribution through the lens of site-specificity as theorized by Miwon Kwon, this essay shows how Our Land, Our People expands the site-specific paradigm as it challenges notions of what makes art site specific; it proposes diasporic communities—communities with implied temporality and often tenuous relationships to their current homes—can serve as the foremost component of the work. I also propose Rigdol’s Our Land, Our People breaks with the conventional label “contemporary Tibetan art,” the phrase currently used to describe art created in Tibet and in exile spaces. Our Land, Our People is primarily in dialogue with one audience in particular—the exile community in Dharamsala.

The visual construction of a landscape by an artist might take into account lighting, material, and recognizable scenery, but these images can also serve as markers of identity, especially for artists living in exile or in a harsh political climate. The contemporary Tibetan artists consulted for this paper (both living in Tibet and elsewhere) address questions that arise when thinking about landscape imagery and Tibet, an already controversial place whose name conjures various definitions. What is real and what is imagined in these place/landscape images? How does the placement of the work in a gallery factor in to the reading of the scene? How does the title work in conjunction with the content to challenge tropes? How does the specific viewing community or space change the narrative? This paper uses the notion of place as an organizing lens through which to navigate identity and identity constructs in contemporary Tibetan art.