Participating in the Venice Biennale has never been an easy feat. To take part in the prestigious event, countries need to secure funding, ship art across the world to Venice, mount an exhibition in a rented structure—most of which are hundreds of years old—and, finally, staff their pavilion for the biennale’s six-month duration.
The usual hurdles were exponentially harder to surmount this year due the dire state of world affairs and the effects of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. For artists and curators from countries that have been hit hardest by Covid-19 or those that have struggled most to foot the bill—presentations require around $100,000 to $300,000, according to several commissioners we spoke to—it’s been a race against both time and resources.
“We are the marginalized of the marginalized—even in the Global South—and we want to change that,” artists Hit Man Gurung and Sheelesha Rajbhandari told Artnet News from Kathmandu, Nepal. The curators of the first ever Nepal Pavilion at the Venice Biennale said it has long been a dream to participate in the celebrated international event, but that financial difficulty and a lack of government support had made it impossible until now.
“The global art scene is always dominated by the powerful countries; the same geopolitics that governs the world governs the art scene,” Gurung said.
In early January 2021, a group of individuals and private arts organizations decided to change that narrative by making the Nepal pavilion a reality—despite the pandemic, and even though they hadn’t yet secured the funding to do so. “We knew we were going to make it happen and put Nepal on the world stage,” Sangeeta Thapa, one of the commissioners, told Artnet News.
Nepal’s featured artist is Tsherin Sherpa, whose work aims to change what he deems “an international understanding of Nepali art plagued by Western conceptualization of the Himalayan region.” The total cost for the pavilion, including shipping, leasing of the space, travel expenses, and mounting of the artwork will be in excess of $200,000, funding for which was still being raised in the penultimate weeks before the event.
Nepal’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation has promised to chip in for shipping costs, but a couple of weeks out from the unveiling, Thapa said the exact contribution had yet to be settled. So far, materializing the pavilion has been helped with support from the Siddhartha Arts Foundation, the Nepal Academy of Fine Arts, Rossi and Rossi gallery—which represents Sherpa—and the Rubin Museum of Art from New York, which has funded 50 percent of costs.