Shadow Circus: A Personal Archive of Tibetan Resistance (1957 – 1974)
The exhibition is an attempt to shed light on what anthropologist and historian Carole McGranahan calls the “arrested histories of the Tibetan resistance army”. In the early 1990s, filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam began researching this story for a documentary film. They were inspired by Sonam’s father, the late Lhamo Tsering, one of the leaders of the Tibetan exile movement and the most important liaison between the Tibetans and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As an archivist and mapmaker, Tsering recognised from the beginning the significance of maintaining a record of this moment in history in order to keep it from fading in cultural memory. Along with the guerrilla fighters whose activities he oversaw, Tsering recorded the struggle as an everyday reality in the volatile geography of Mustang in Nepal, photographing every mundane event.
The show revisits Tsering’s personal archives on the subject, juxtaposed with the audio-visual material that Sarin and Sonam have collected over the years. It also includes a re-edited version of their 1998 documentary, The Shadow Circus, to create a more complete and complex mosaic of this still largely untold story.
Where: Experimenter, Colaba, Mumbai
When: 27 July to 26 August