Our mothers’ silences

“Someone said curation is a generous act, and I said, no it’s a selfish act. I took so much from all of you!” Bunu Dhungana tells me over the phone while sipping her coffee at a borrowing bookstore in Delhi.

When Bunu, who I’ve only known from a distance as an artist, reached out to me in August asking me to write something for her exhibit, I greeted her with surprise. No one had asked me before to be part of a collective. So, there was me who had never written for an exhibit before and there was Bunu who had never curated solo before.

“Curation is an extension of my work,” Bunu explains. For her exhibition, she left the word “Mother” with a group of artists she had chosen, to see what they would come up with. During my two-month deadline, we embraced silence while thoughts simmered.

As an artist herself, Bunu was highly interested in the process. And for me, who has never really had a tangible writing process, I didn’t have much to show her as the process, besides some images of my mother and brief notes on my phone. The process of creating is varied and subjective. Some days, it feels like the whole process is a slow-drawn retch-- a purgation of sorts.

In retrospect, the procedure for this piece was just Bunu waiting patiently and quietly, while I thought. Even as an insular writer, I have always sought an audience. And Bunu was creating that for me and all the other artists she was working with.

The larger exhibition, A matter of time, with Bunu’s curation titled Somethings in the Belly, brought together works by Asmita Badi, Ayushma Regmi, Irina Giri, Shradha Devkota, Tripty Tamang Pakhrin, Shristi Shrestha, Ujjwala Maharjan and yours truly.

“I have done work on mother-daughter relationships before. And one night it came to me-- why don’t I ask people to respond to the word?” And so Bunu churned a cauldron of the term “Mother” for the bunch of us, so we would cast spells over ourselves to awaken memories related to our origin, sifting through the trappings of time.

Somethings in the Belly brings together a set of different mediums in the form of poems, short stories, letters, paintings, sounds and images. La.Lit’s These fine lines anthology of poetry was part of the curation guide for Bunu, so some of us in the collective had already appeared together before.

Juxtaposed in the form of mixed genres of work, each strand in Somethings in the Belly reminds us about our existence, as it takes us back to the womb where we took form. The gestation is always ugly and often painful and so is the process of thinking about our mothers-- we inherit her suffering.

Ayushma articulates the sentiment in one of her letters: 'So far we have perpetuated the suffering inherited from I don’t know how many generations of mothers who always kept every trauma locked in their wombs, only to birth them out in the form of their own children.'

So, there we were, eight women, each transcribing our feelings for our mothers in our own ways. Ayushma embraced the simple yet intense epistolary format. Asmita did it in the form of a poem written/performed for her mother (translated into English by Prawin Adhikari). Ujjwala did it as performance poetry, standing in a courtyard, speaking of unspeakable things. Shradha put together seamless embroidery. Irina composed sound sequences guided by poetry. Tripti made images of her mothers. Shristi painted the intimate in Gouache. I wrote anecdotes about my mother and thought: our mothers bring us into this world but the only way we can bring them into the world is by offering our words or work.

From the start, Bunu envisioned the exhibit as a process rather than an output. “We are so obsessed with output that it stops us sometimes. We have to let go of the idea of perfection.”

Her first curation experience has been one filled with learning. She had started out, bordering on distrust, wondering if she would be able to do it. She didn’t know where to start, but once she put up the first work, it all came together like many narratives converging.

The works are summed up in a catalogue where they are labelled, and artists identified. But at the exhibit space in Delhi, Bunu had a circle going-- like the womb-- where works were put up without the names of artists. “People were a bit thrown off by the fact that there were no names, but we wanted it to be a collective experience.”

While she worked with each artist individually, she likes to call it a collective. “I liked being in process with you all individually. When I put it together, it felt like a collective-- the thread that connects all of you even though you were making work individually.”

Bunu says that Somethings in the Belly collective has responded to her intrigue over the word “mother” in ways unexpected: “All of you gave it your interpretation and your work. My understanding was limited and my own thinking expanded beyond my own obsession, to hear you all.”

Somewhere along the way, perhaps those of us who were part of her curation also felt freed to move on to the next stage of our lives from wounds we had been cradling over the years. Perhaps dwelling on the being of our mothers was a way of becoming all over again?

“Now I realise why people do art exhibitions. Even if it is temporary. The process is beautiful,” Bunu says as she finishes her coffee, and we prepare to hang up.

(Bunu plans to bring the exhibition home to Kathmandu in 2024. Somethings in the Belly was part of her fellowship for A matter of time, exhibited at India International Centre, New Delhi from 13-19 December 2023.)