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 mountainous kingdom of Mustang on the Nepal-Tibet border was shut down by the Nepalese army. This chapter of recent Tibetan history has been largely forgotten, partly due to its clandestine nature and partly as an instinctive act of omission on the part of official Tibetan narratives, which, from the 1970s onwards, sought to highlight the essentially non-violent nature of the freedom struggle.
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. As an archivist and mapmaker, Lhamo Tsering recognised from the beginning, the vital importance of maintaining a record of the resistance in order to guard against its erasure from historic memory. Along with the guerrilla fighters whose activities he oversaw, he chronicled the struggle as a daily reality in the hostile geography of Mustang, photographing everything from training procedures to communal exchanges and religious festivities. These photographs, along with documents, letters and maps that he collected over the years 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 unshackle and shed light on what anthropologist and historian Carole McGranahan calls, “arrested histories of the Tibetan resistance army”. It re-evaluates Lhamo Tsering’s personal archives 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. A hand-drawn guerrilla training manual in Tibetan by an unknown resistance artist that Lhamo Tsering saved becomes a vital entry point into choreographing this archival ensemble. The Cold War epoch is navigated via a personal journey that transcends the calculated alliances of geopolitical power blocs and sheds light on the human dimension of intelligence gathering, guerrilla warfare and clandestine resistance deployed in the service of an unfinished freedom struggle that continues to resonate today.
- Ritu Sarin, Tenzing Sonam, and Natasha Ginwala'
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 mountainous kingdom of Mustang on the Nepal-Tibet border was shut down by the Nepalese army. This chapter of recent Tibetan history has been largely forgotten, partly due to its clandestine nature and partly as an instinctive act of omission on the part of official Tibetan narratives, which, from the 1970s onwards, sought to highlight the essentially non-violent nature of the freedom struggle.
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. As an archivist and mapmaker, Lhamo Tsering recognised from the beginning, the vital importance of maintaining a record of the resistance in order to guard against its erasure from historic memory. Along with the guerrilla fighters whose activities he oversaw, he chronicled the struggle as a daily reality in the hostile geography of Mustang, photographing everything from training procedures to communal exchanges and religious festivities. These photographs, along with documents, letters and maps that he collected over the years 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 unshackle and shed light on what anthropologist and historian Carole McGranahan calls, “arrested histories of the Tibetan resistance army”. It re-evaluates Lhamo Tsering’s personal archives 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. A hand-drawn guerrilla training manual in Tibetan by an unknown resistance artist that Lhamo Tsering saved becomes a vital entry point into choreographing this archival ensemble. The Cold War epoch is navigated via a personal journey that transcends the calculated alliances of geopolitical power blocs and sheds light on the human dimension of intelligence gathering, guerrilla warfare and clandestine resistance deployed in the service of an unfinished freedom struggle that continues to resonate today.
- Ritu Sarin, Tenzing Sonam, and Natasha Ginwala'
Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam have made several award-winning films and art/archive installations under the banner of White Crane Films. Their work focuses primarily on Tibet and attempts to document and reflect on the questions of exile, identity, culture and nationalism that confront the Tibetan people. They are based in Dharamshala, India, where they also run the Dharamshala International Film Festival, one of India’s leading independent film festivals, which they founded in 2012.
Natasha Ginwala is a curator, researcher and writer, artistic director of Colomboscope, Sri Lanka since 2019 and associate Curator at Large at Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018 – 2024). She was also artistic director of the 13th Gwangju Biennale with Defne Ayas (2021). Ginwala has been part of curatorial teams of 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2014), Contour Biennale 8, documenta 14 (2017), Taipei Biennale 2012 and co-curated several international exhibitions including at e-flux, Sharjah Art Foundation, Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, ifa Gallery, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, L’appartement 22, Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, MCA Chicago, 56th Venice Biennale, SAVVY Contemporary and Zeitz MOCAA. Ginwala is a widely published author with a focus on contemporary art, visual culture, and social justice.