KAUSHAL JOSHI
Visual Artist, Kathmandu, Nepal
Kaushal Joshi is a Kathmandu based interdisciplinary visual artist. His works are mostly related to sociopolitical and environmental issues. Kaushal had done MFA from Beijing China. He has participated in several national and international art residencies and festivals/ biennials. Currently, he is working as a program coordinator and assistant professor at Kathmandu University Department of Art and Design
Where do we go? Installation view, Colombo Art Biennale 2016, “Conceiving Space”
House, a tangible form of desires, memories, ego, a space owned, a place of comfort, where the past, present and future of life mingles, where body and mind reside. Building a house is as an act of owning space, fulfilling the emptiness with the materialistic world has been a part of our living process, ignoring to the temporariness of belonging, we grow, nurture our lives, live a life like we never die, till the illusion ends and after all everything we possess, will extinct to the infinite space. The answer still remains gloomy and undesirable to the question ‘Where do we go?’
Sample, Installation, Kathmandu International Art Festival 2012 “Earth, Body, Mind”, Patan Museum
Nepal’s holy rivers have become dump sites. Millions of plastic bags pile on the banks of Kathmandu’s sacred Bagmati and Bishnumati rivers, merging with the land as if they had been there for years. It will be years before these plastic bags decay, and even then, they will be distributed into plastic dust. By the time that diffuses, more plastic bags will be added to this vulnerable land, poisoning the once-fertile earth, water, animals, humans and the whole environment. Inspired from the work of geologists and archaeologists, who drill under the earth, into the deep sea bottom, and under rocks and ice to bring up core samples that reveal intimate details of the climate and fauna of the distant past, my work presents a core sample of earth layered with plastic bags: thin lines of plastic piled with clay or mud and shaped like core samples, in cylindrical pillars. These are core samples of our values and samples of the future that awaits us.