KALĀ KULO

Ephemeral & Enduring: Lain Singh Bangdel Archives and Engaged Collection Care

“Ephemeral & Enduring: Lain Singh Bangdel Archives and Engaged Collection Care'' aimed to document the multifaceted life and oeuvre of Lain Singh Bangdel (1919-2002), an eminent figure in the field of modern art and literature of Nepal. Bangdel’s prolific career as a writer, artist, historian, and academician transcends the geo-spatial bounds of both metropole and peripheries such as Darjeeling, Calcutta, Kathmandu, London, and Paris. Despite these deep transnational affinities, Bangdel remains an obscure figure in the re/imagination of South Asia’s modern and contemporary art history. Kalā Kulo has adopted an engaged collection care approach in this project in order to pay attention to both the ephemeral and enduring nature of the archival materials included in the estate of Lain Singh Bangdel. The estate includes photographs, photo negatives, slides, correspondence letters, postcards, notes, unpublished manuscripts, exhibition catalogs, newspaper clippings, and much more.

Working in tandem with archivists, researchers, and conservationists, the team have been documenting, digitizing, and managing the collection. These efforts will culminate in a symposium in 2025 generating conversations regarding the processes, challenges, and possibilities of archiving and conserving such materials from the 20th century.

The “Ephemeral and Enduring: Lain Singh Bangdel & Engaged Collection Care” project, supported by ASAP’s Archiving Grant, involved the scoping, structuring, and digitization of over 4,000 archival materials from the estate of Lain Singh Bangdel—a mid-20th century cosmopolitan artist whose life spanned Darjeeling, Calcutta, London, Paris, and Kathmandu. The project also sparked local dialogue on archival best practices and strengthened Kalā Kulo’s archiving capacity through collaborations with transregional partners, including the Bangdel & Shakya Foundation and Asia Art Archive – India.

KALĀ KULO

Kalā Kulo is a non-profit initiative that nurtures the flows and frictions of creative labor. Based in Kathmandu, the team experiments with speculative praxis - where acts, thoughts, and relations are reimagined - to irrigate new constellations of ideas and kinships; working across fields and frameworks of knowledge production, they embrace fluid and collaborative methodologies. Existing projects include contextualizing body marking traditions across the Indo-Nepal border, assembling a repository of modernist visual practices from Nepal, and generating transregional dialog on movements of peoples and ideas.