Shadow Circus
A Personal Archive of Tibetan Resistance (1957-1974)

After the Communist Chinese invasion of 1950 and its subsequent takeover in 1959, Tibet has been a country under occupation. Since then, resistance to Chinese rule, both inside Tibet and in exile, has been unyielding and resilient, transforming over time in response to the changing situation in China and the shifting winds of geopolitical alignments. But, little is known of the guerrilla war that was fought from the mid-1950s to 1974 when thousands of Tibetans took up arms against the invading forces of China, a movement that became entangled in global geopolitics when the CIA got involved.

The CIA’s involvement in the Tibetan resistance started in 1956, at the height of the Cold War. Codenamed STCIRCUS, it was one of the CIA’s longest running covert operations until it was abruptly abandoned in the late 1960s when US foreign policy pivoted to find accommodation with China. The resistance collapsed in 1974 when its last stronghold in the mountain kingdom of Mustang on the Nepal-Tibet border was shut down by the Nepalese army.

In the early 1990s, filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam started to research this story for a documentary film. They were inspired by Tenzing’s father, the late Lhamo Tsering, one of the leaders of the resistance and the key liaison between the Tibetans and the CIA. Lhamo Tsering recognised the vital importance of maintaining a record of the resistance in order to guard against its erasure from historic memory. He saved thousands of photographs, letters, documents, maps and miscellaneous artefacts that chronicled the struggle as a daily reality in the hostile geography of Mustang. These proved indispensable when, in his later years, he wrote a monumental eight-volume history of the resistance.

The exhibition, SHADOW CIRCUS, is an attempt to re-evaluates Lhamo Tsering’s personal archive in conjunction with the audio-visual material that Ritu and Tenzing gathered over the years, and includes a re-edited version of their 1998 documentary – The Shadow Circus – to create a more complete and complex mosaic of this still largely unknown story.

[The inaugural version of SHADOW CIRCUS was curated by Natasha Ginwala and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and exhibited at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin from 7 February to 10 March 2019, within the programme of the 14th Forum Expanded, 69th Berlinale. In collaboration with Natasha Ginwala, different iterations of the exhibition were shown at India International Centre (New Delhi), Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and Experimenter-Colaba (Mumbai).]