The Corridor, Ladakh for the sã Biennale

The decision was made for me by the security staff at Terminal 1, Delhi Airport.

As the security officer took the contraband off me, I knew my time had come. E-cigarettes have been banned in India since 2019. When I last visited, in 2023, I must still have been smoking the real sticks. The security guys were jovial about it, but later I learned that the punishment for a first offence of importing an e-cigarette can include imprisonment.

My ignorance is a roomy cave.

I was on my way to Leh, in Ladakh, a Himalayan town 3,500 metres above sea level, for the sā Biennale, a contemporary-art exhibition spread across the region's monasteries, villages, ruins, and landscapes.

At the airport I was reading about the poet Franz Wright in the New Yorker. A passage described his poems as “usually at least a little funny” and often structured like extended punch lines. I liked the idea of a joke that reveals itself only after you have already walked into it.

I would spend the next week wondering whether the same might be true of the Biennale.

My layover in Delhi was six hours. I messaged my guide in Leh to tell him I would be late. His reply arrived at 5:21 a.m.: “OK.”

His saved contact name was “Find joy in the journey.”

I smiled and decided to try.

Leh airport looked as though Wes Anderson had designed it on a budget. There were hand-painted signs, simple mechanical systems and an improvised quality to everything. In the SIM-card queue I met a man from London. I told him that Leh had the highest commercial airport in the world. He told me it did not. He was right, although his alternative, El Alto, Bolivia, wasn't right either. I later learned that the highest commercial airport is Daocheng Yading in China, at 4,411 metres.

By the end of day one, I had spent several hours asleep, which everyone assured me was not sleeping but “acclimatising” to the altitude.

That evening I went to Rang Thag Gallery for a screening of short films presented by the Dharamshala International Film Festival. I was so exhausted the films seemed to arrive through a veil, but certain things remained visible; youth, home, belonging, nature, the beauty of small things.

In the same building was an exhibition by Studio Eidola, a Zurich-based interdisciplinary design and material-research practice. Its subject was wool.

This turned out to be a useful place to begin understanding Ladakh.

The exhibition described the semi-nomadic Changpa pastoralists, whose sheep move through enormous landscapes, unlike the static agricultural systems familiar to Europeans. Wool is difficult to collect under nomadic circumstances and much of it goes unused. I learnt that wool can be employed in soil restoration and concrete reinforcement.

Then there was the story of salt and sheep.

Historically, salt from Ladakh's high-altitude lakes was carried down by the Changpa on the backs of sheep. Each animal could carry ten to fifteen kilograms in woven bags. These caravans of sheep carrying salt into Zanskar continued until as recently as the mid-1980s.

The research proposed that we rethink the Silk Road not as a road at all, but as a corridor. One made of a system of seasonal knowledge, hospitality, negotiation, and trust. Movement here was more than a straight line towards a destination, it was a choreography of waiting and risk.

Ladakh is a place defined by movement; people, animals, goods, stories, religions, ideas. The seemingly remote landscape is misleading. For centuries, this has been a place through which things pass.

The sā Biennale had positioned itself within that context.

My guide, Stobdan, picked me up the following morning. We went to see the artworks in Leh Old Town.

The first was Manmo, by Stanzin Wangail, a turquoise-clad creature that thread itself through the old buildings. It drew on the Ladakhi folklore of the manmo, a supernatural female presence.

Further up the hill, Jigmet Angmo had installed Dungjonma and the Inward House, based on another local story: a mysterious female figure pulls the central beam from a house and replaces it with a strand of her hair. The story can be read as one of collapse, but Angmo's work suggested something more complicated about the precarious architectures we construct around our lives.

Tenzin Olden's Untitled, made from mud plaster, aged stone and abandoned structures, was quieter. It looked as though it has been excavated from the hillside it sat on.

I began to understand why the Biennale had chosen this landscape.

Stobdan and I wondered up to Ancient Palace Leh, an engineering feat of the Namgyal dynasty. The palace looms over Leh on a steep mass of rocky mountain. It was constructed in just three years in a Tibetan architectural style under the instruction of Songe Namgyal (1590-1635 AD). It remained occupied until the time of the Dogra invasion (1834-40).

Once onto the upper floors of the palace and looking out across the roofs, one sort of feels like the whole thing emerges from the mountains with such ease you can’t imagine it not being there. The simplicity in the architecture and the smallness of the details in such a vast structure make you feel humble and at home. Is that incredibly awful of me to say I felt ‘at home’ inside a royal palace?

The next day, in Basgo, the Maitreya Temple sits among the ruins of a sixteenth-century castle.

Below the monastery, the artist Chimet Dorjey had made Burrowed in Time, 108 marmots sculpted from earth and water gathered from the surrounding landscape. Apparently 108 is an auspicious number in Hinduism and Buddhism, representing spiritual completion and the wholeness of the universe. The artist told us that marmots used to be nicknamed ‘gold-digging ants’.

The legend of gold-digging ants stems from a real-world confusion involving the Himalayan marmot and a translation error. The ancient Greek writer Herodotus claimed fox-sized ants dug up gold dust in Central Asia. It might be explained by the fact that the old Persian word for "marmot" translates literally to "mountain ant," which led Greek chroniclers to misinterpret the furry diggers as giant insects. Locals would allegedly rush to collect the glittering gold dust left on the surface while the beasts hid from the midday sun.

Dorjey’s artwork reflects on hibernation and the cyclical endurance of nature. Thinking about subterranean habitats he considers how the continuity of social life was maintained. I’m now wondering about underground raves and nightclubs. But when I looked at this work, it struck me that the marmots were gathered in a circle and at the foot of the monastery where above the monks were gathering. To me, these became marmot monks of Basgo.​

The next day we headed out of Leh and back through the military camps to Likir. The monastery there dates back to 1065, it was a wedding cake amalgam of tiered temples and tiny viewpoints. Ancient frescoes depicting the Buddhist Wheel of Life, with the ignorant pig, angry snake, and greedy bird in the centre. Inside one of the temples I was confronted with rows and rows of giant khinkali, yellow and twisting, each one the size of a seated labrador. Upon closer inspection these giant Georgian dumplings were in fact made of wool and were in fact the winter cloaks for the monks here, known as chogu, worn by Vajrayana monks to stay warm in the hard Himalayan winters.

Tundup Dorjay we met on a rocky mountain side in Likir and he talked us through his installation, Kaktse sNam. He told us how historically, families from Likir were entrusted by the Ladakhi kings with creating pottery. There were shipping and logistics complications with moving all this pottery (sounds familiar!) to the point that the Likir makers decided to create Nomadic pottery studios, where they would journey to different vicinities and use the materials available on site to create what was needed. Dorjay’s work consists of intricate tapestries of fragments of pottery collected by the artist along those old potter routes and settlements. Dorjay has hung these cascades of pottery in a way as to complete the ruined structure it sits around, he has restored to a whole and made something resonant.

Further along the same hillside we found a scattering of small clay pots, laying before us like breadcrumbs on a picnic blanket. Shupiwe Chongwe created Vessel to make manifest the process of weathering through her sculptures. Everywhere you looked you could find another pot tucked into some corner, hidden in some alcove.

We took lunch at Alchi Kitchen, a women-run traditional Ladakhi restaurant. To dine here, I recommend you to have achieved the Buddhist state of Mushin (No-Mind). The waits are long, but the feast was worth it.

Carried on driving to Nurla. Where we found an old bridge over the Indus River hosting artwork, 3000 realms by Hylozoic/Desires, a multimedia poet-musician duo.

Imagine a creaky old bridge over a gushing great river. Imagine the bridge has 2000 tiny iron & wood bells attached, and thousands of shimmering shards of glass. Positioned as a “sonic crossing between realms” the artwork encourages one to first of all consider the significance of the bell, their use in ceremonies, their use to signal change, then to think of its shape (like a cloak), a well of invisible forces (thinking now back to the yellow monk cloaks). The artists ask us to walk across this chiming bridge and to cross the threshold of who we are now and the many lives that are yet to come. For me this work meant a lot. I’m sentimental and I love poetry and I crumple under my existential fears. The work was even more poignant for me by virtue of the fact it took place above this great, brute force of the Indus River. Nietzsche suddenly found me, like a bell ringing in my ear;

“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!”

Further to Nietzsche, my mind wondered to the mani wheel I’d just seen at Basgo Monastery. These prayer wheels are a cylindrical metal drum filled with millions of sacred mantras. Stobdan told me, that as you spin the wheel and the bell chimes, the lessons you need to learn that day are absorbed by you.

Apparently 1000 bells from the artwork are to be donated to the neighbouring villages, “to ring in their own tune”. The sort of sentence that makes the international art world feel slightly more at ease with its idiosyncratic peculiarities.

I asked Stobdan whether he knew anyone attending the Biennale.

No.

Had anyone heard of it?

No.

Did people in his community care?

No.

Would they enjoy it if they came?

Not particularly.

He explained that people in his community preferred festivals with music, dancing, local performance, archery and horse riding. The Ladakhi Nomadic Festival would begin on the day the sā Biennale ended.

This struck me as more than an amusing cultural difference.

The Biennale had made a corridor through Ladakh, but it had not necessarily joined the existing ones.

There were no opening or closing parties. This fact was presented as evidence that the event was unlike other biennales. But the absence of social life began to feel like a weakness rather than a virtue.

This bienalle felt strangely lonely.

And then there were the information boards.

They had been generated, or at least heavily shaped, by AI. After seeing enough of them, I began to notice the sameness of their language: transience, impermanence, connection, nature, memory. The artworks themselves could be wildly different, but their explanations seemed to have been pressed through the same linguistic machine.

More troubling was the language.

The boards were in English.

There was no Urdu, Bhoti or Hindi.

In a Biennale whose stated interest was so deeply rooted in Ladakh's cultural landscape, this felt like an extraordinary omission. Who exactly was being spoken to?

And who was being spoken for?

Day 5 we were in Lamayuru, the artworks struggled against the landscape.

Stepping into Lamayuru Moonland is like being shrunk to the size of 5 pence coin and tossed right into the middle of the bread shelf in a bakery. You land, tails, on top of rows of brioche, challah, focaccia. There’s a section higher up that if I could snap it off, I’m sure would be Cantucci. This bowl of bread was apparently once a vast high-altitude lake, and the centuries of erosion before its eventual disappearance left behind this undulating pale cratered clay. The local myth is a holy teacher, Naropa, made the water drain away so he could build a temple.

It’s hard for any work of art to hold its own in a landscape as out-of-this-world mind-bendingly seductive as this one. Sadly, the artworks here didn’t manage. Studio Eidola’s, Ground Control, was a nice grid of marigold dyed sheep’s wool, aimed at being a warning to potential future Lithium scoping. It looked ‘cool’ as an installation here on the moon, a giant yellow noughts and crosses grid, but ultimately it was flat and the conceptual framework felt loose.

There is a difference between making art about a place and making something with it.

The most powerful work I saw made that distinction.

As we neared Hunderman Village our driver pointed out Pakistan to us. Hunderman has shifted control between India and Pakistan through numerous wars. It’s currently with India and has been since the 1971 India-Pakistan war.

The abandoned village appeared before us, a towering, teetering cluster of stone and mud dwellings – stacked on top of one another like baskets of vegetables at the market. The ancient houses sat on terraces as did the barley crop being grown beneath. Far out to the left and right of this market stand of a village, stretched the ruddy, rusty Himalayas.

Some Biennale attendees were at the top of Hunderman Village when we got there. One picked up a toy handgun that had been left in the dust. He and his friend were laughing as they walked away with it. I felt uneasy and wanted him to put it back down, which he eventually did, almost as though he could feel my pleading eyes searing into his back.

Artist Zahara Batool created perhaps the most powerful piece of the whole Biennale. It is a lift when you feel the best has been saved until last.

Batool who is from Kargil, gathered a group of local women artisans, who all worked together on largescale knitting, embroidery, crochet and textile traditions. The outcome is a series of colourful blankets and nets that rest on the shattered roofs of the village.

This sense of repair and female healing, nurturing was outstandingly powerful. I was further knocked back in my seat when I walked along the lower path and heard the laughter and chatter of the local artisan ladies and some attendees. They were sharing tea and biscuits. Babies snuggled and children hopping around playing with water bottles and chatting to people who didn’t understand them. The sun was beaming through the apple trees and the amalgam of life and love that emanated from these women and the artworks they had created, as well as the tea they had made, and the biscuits they had baked – sat next to and on top of this war-torn town – made me smile ear to ear. I took a seat on the floor with the ladies and asked if I could take their photo, they nodded.

Later, I asked Stobdan what he thought of Batool's work.

He considered it.

“This one I like,” he said.

Why?

“Because it's colourful. It's bigger. And it's good here in this place.”

Good here in this place.

It was perhaps the best criticism I heard all week.

The work was good because it belonged here.

As we walked back towards the car, one of the women called after us.

“See you tomorrow!”

I wished it were true.

We drove back towards Leh along the same corridor through which we had travelled in the opposite direction. A week had passed since I left London. I had become preoccupied with movement. Who gets to move through a place, who gets to tell its stories, who gets translated.

The sā Biennale is flawed. Some of the work felt hurried; some of the ideas were thin; some of the language sounded as though it had been manufactured at a distance. But the event had created a new route through a landscape of ancient crossings.

The challenge for an international art event in Ladakh is to learn how to navigate an existing corridor without mistaking it for empty space. The old Silk Road was an accumulation of negotiations.

The same might be true of art.

One thing I can say for certain though is that I didn’t smoke once during my 10 days in the Himalayas. Those mountains somehow make you want to do better, to be better.

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