Vernissage: Bruce McCoy Owens

The Festival of Bungadya, Rain God of the Kathmandu Valley: Forty Years of Photographs

The chariot festival of Bungadya held each year in the Kathmandu Valley is arguably the largest of the hundreds of festivals orchestrated by its indigenous Newa inhabitants. It commemorates the arrival of a deity honored for ending a twelve-year drought some 1,400 years ago and seeks to please him in order to bring the vital monsoon rains. Doing so involves great risk and cacophonous chaos as well as careful planning and skilled artistry. Anthropologist Bruce Owens has been photographing this extraordinary spectacle and those who make it possible for over forty years as part of his research, compelled also by the beauty that is intrinsic to Newa ritual practice and public celebration.

This exhibition is an outgrowth of three other exhibitions he mounted in Nepal in the fall of 2016 with the encouragement of festival participants and invitations from the Patan Museum, one of Nepal’s national museums, and Photo Kathmandu, an international photography festival mounted largely outdoors at various sites in the medieval city of Patan and vicinity. These exhibits were intended to honor those whose work is critical to the festival’s success and to display the many kinds of “god’s work” (dyaḥyā jyaḥ) required for its performance. The majority of images are derived from Kodachrome exposed in the early 1980s and ‘90s, when relatively few Nepalese had cameras, fewer still had access to color film and processing, and the now-ubiquitous cell phones did not exist. Many capture scenes that cannot be seen today, given the radical transformations that the Kathmandu Valley and Nepalese society have undergone. Yet the core of the traditional practices, from the way the image is renewed each year to the construction of his massive chariot, remain remarkably intact. This exhibition is intended to honor this tradition by revealing its complexities and beauty to those who may never have set foot in the Kathmandu Valley and to remind those who have of what they left behind.