The net of womanhood: A sculptor from Kargil brings memories of home, culture and community

Working with copper wire and coloured wire at Kargil’s Hunderman village along the Shingo River, close to the LoC, Batool draws from the landscape she grew up around and the people who inhabit it, particularly women whose everyday labour and cultural practices have helped preserve the region’s heritage. Batool, a postgraduate from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, has also presented her works in group exhibitions at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda, and Arthshila, Shantiniketan, as well as a solo exhibition at LAMO, Leh.

“The unique and fragile topography is what continues to inspire me since my childhood, along with its rich heritage, which is my main inspiration. It is also how women of my community mainly continue to preserve and pass on those practices fascinates me a lot,” says the 32-year-old.

It is this intersection of landscape, memory and women’s lives that gives her participation in the biennale a particular significance. The event, extended to August 31, takes contemporary art beyond conventional exhibition spaces and into the lived landscapes of Ladakh. For Batool, it is also about allowing stories from Kargil to travel beyond the region.

“This is a great platform. Especially for local Ladakhi artists as it gives us a platform to represent our land and people at an international level so that everyone can connect to us, our land, our people, and our concerns,” she adds.

Batool’s interest in womanhood comes from both observation and experience. The patriarchal structures she has encountered are part of the questions she brings into her practice. “I am really inspired by the women of my community and also in general because as we know most parts of our country have patriarchal setups, including in Kargil. As a woman, I have lived those experiences. I wanted to somehow initiate a conversation around the conditions of women and acknowledge them,” says Batool, who’s been making art for the past 11 years.

A larger stage

Running under the theme ‘Signals from Another Star’, the inaugural sa Ladakh Biennale brings together 19 international and Ladakhi artists and artist duos across eight sites and roughly 230 km along the Leh-Kargil corridor. Unlike a conventional biennale concentrated inside galleries, the terrain is part of the experience rather than simply a backdrop.

For associate curator and independent Ladakhi artist Tsering Motup Siddho, that approach began with the selection of artists. The earlier sa Ladakh festival had used an open-call model. For the biennale, Siddho and lead curator Vishal K Dar reached out to Ladakhi artists individually, met them and discussed their practices before taking them to potential sites. “I thought it is meaningless to do an open call in the curatorial framework. So we did several drafts, three to four rounds of meeting over a call, meeting in person with each artist. We wanted to keep it organic,” says Siddho.

The artists were then taken to potential locations, allowing the sites to influence the work. “All of these were site-responsive artworks. It was more like they went to the site and what the site sort of asked for, or how they relate to the site. That’s how they came up,” he adds.

At Likir, Tundup Dorjay’s pottery practice connects with a village known for its pottery traditions. At Basgo, Chemat Dorjay’s sculptural practice responds to the setting. In Mulbekh, Stanzin Samphel created a roughly 750-metre line using locally sourced marble dust, drawing from patterns associated with animal migration.

“He (Samphel) responds in a very abstract manner about the migration group and something that he wanted to see on the landscape. There was a local marble that has been cut for the kitchen, and they produce a lot of this marble dust. It was just lying there and they were happy to give it for free. So we got one truck full of that marble dust.”

The ecological dimension is embedded in the making of the works, says Siddho. “In terms of ecology and all that, I think it’s something that comes along with the work. It’s something that you don’t stress towards. The ecological aspect is attached to it. It’s a natural thing that comes along with it rather than stressing towards it.”

A local ecosystem

The biennale comes as Ladakh’s contemporary art community seeks greater visibility outside the region. Siddho says the community has existed for more than a decade, with artists exhibiting collectively, sharing studios and supporting one another. “It’s something that we’ve been collectively working with. It didn’t come into a popular narrative earlier but on the scale of local context now, some of these artists are celebrated well locally.”

He traces this collective effort to exhibitions such as Among the Mountains at LAMO in 2012. “Since then we’ve been pushing ahead because when it comes to art people don’t really understand art much. But now that we all have individually and collectively worked together people know what art is, what kind of artist one is.”

The biennale’s Above 3000m Fellowship, supported by Royal Enfield Social Mission and Trikona Foundation and mentored by Siddho and Dar, builds on this ecosystem. The inaugural fellowship supports five Ladakhi artists, including Batool.

Its wider funding and institutional network includes the regional government and Municipal Committee Leh, diplomatic and cultural partners from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Australia and Chile, and cultural institutions including LAMO and the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art. NPO and foundation partners include Trikona Foundation, Neekoe Foundation, The Ford Family Foundation, The Gural Foundation, Roots Ladakh, Local Futures and Saraf Foundation. Royal Enfield is the CSR partner, alongside Dadaa, Pagir and Good Life.

For Siddho, sustainability is more important than simply increasing the size of the event. “I wouldn’t say a greater expansion of the fund is important, but a sustainable sort of funding is important in order to do something like this at this scale. How you use the limited amount of funding in a much more meaningful way is something that I think rather than a humongous amount of money that you spend.”

The organisers have also tried to rethink their relationship with communities, using exchanges instead of only monetary transactions.

“Rather than the funding transaction, it is a good sort of an exchange. When you start giving money to someone for an exchange, they will raise it next time when you come. And then let’s say if there is a researcher who doesn’t have much funds, who goes into a village and does his research, he may get trapped into it saying that he must be having money because people know that now all of these researchers, artists, can give money. So that’s something that we didn’t want to spoil.”

An open canvas

The visitor experience is inseparable from the journey through the landscape. “We wanted our audience to slightly travel in this open landscape. Not treated like a gallery where you know everything is manicured.”

The organisers were conscious of high-altitude travel and did not want the experience to become an arduous trek. “We didn’t want to keep it like a 2-3 hours of a trek and then you get to see the work. But it was more or less like a little bit of travel here and there. So people are enjoying this open landscape.”

For Batool, the experience should ultimately change how visitors see Ladakh. “I also want them to understand our beautiful land with its fragility, respect its limitedness, and interact with its resources responsibly,” she adds.

As the first edition draws towards its extended close, Siddho says the focus for future editions will be on learning rather than simply expanding. “We are also in the process. We are also learning a lot from the mistakes that we have made or learning from the positive sides that we have.”

And the future, he says, need not mean a bigger biennale. “What we have done this time is something that we are very proud of. In the future similarly, we will think of newer ideas and concepts, how we can bring more people together, being more sensitive enough to the local and how we can fine-tune what we have just done in a much more sensible manner,” adds Siddho.