Invisible connection-II / Mekh Limbu, Nepal

Invisible connection-II
note by Mekh Limbu

My art work is a visual diary about relationship between me and my father. I will be using intimate letters, recordings of phone conversation between us, family photographs of social gathering, celebrations, festivals, images of my father at his workplace, with his friends in the camp and his short visits to Nepal, documents and official paper works and belongings of our family in my art work.

I belong to Kirat origin; youth joinining the British and Indian Army is very common trend in my society. However, in later days the pattern of migration shifted. Most of my relatives and villagers were flying to Malaysia and gulf countries as labor workers. My father was a primary School teacher at Dhankuta, Nepal before he joined a Construction Company at Doha, Qatar and have been working there for 20 years. Being only person to earn in the family of eight members, it was very difficult and challenging for him to run the family as a primary school teacher. Therefore he left Nepal when I was just 8 years old. Though he was not physically presence his continuous support, love and care was sensed in the family.

In the course of 20 years my father visited us only four times. In the meantime, Nepal went through major socio- political and technological changes like royal family’s massacre, civil war, end of monarchy, movement for democracy & federal government and endless strikes. All of these affected the socio-economic structure of the country. This instability in the country led to more internal and international migration. While most of my friends were applying for foreign education or employment, I joined Fine Art College in the capital city and I started my career as an artist.

During my father initial days of work, he used to say "This place is like a desert with very few people, It is hard to find another Nepali here." Qatar with its oil production, liberalization policies and economic development strategies has become Newly Industrialized Country which demand more Foreign Migrant Workers (FMWs). This lead to explosion in FMWs. Now my father says, "You meet almost all the youths from a particular Nepali village." Qatar has witnessed its rise from being a small fishing port in the middle of the desert to a multibillion dollar country with the contribution of tears, blood and life of millions of Foreign Migrant Workers.

Me and my father’s life diverted in different directions because of his absence for such a long time. The intimacy we had slowly faded away, although he tried to keep it alive through frequent communication by means of letter and phone calls. This is a critical problem in many families in our country. Like my father there are millions of Nepalese who works outside of Nepal separated from their families. The issue of International labor migration is my personal experience but it is related with many other people who are also facing these critical circumstances. Every day almost 1700 people are leaving Nepal for work. And most of them are young people.

Display:
The work constitutes of two adjacent walls right angle to each other (corner wall). On one wall depicts my own timeline and another wall depicts my father's time line. The timeline is represented through intimate photographs, letters , mirrors, the excerpt from the political events, social and cultural changes, personal belongings and voice recordings of conversation between me and my father, installed in the wooden boxes of different sizes indicating the different events in different time periods which we face during all these 20 years of separation.