From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Renewal
This article covers the 2024–present participatory installation in Bhaktapur. For related durational and participatory works, see The Caught Descent—A Devotional Installation in Broken Hill, NSW. For South Asian adaptations and scholarship, see South Asian adaptations of Beach Surgery.
Renewal is a 2024–present participatory durational installation by Bhaktapur-based artists, exploring the breaking (or non-breaking) of the cycle through the concepts of unborn possibility and renewal rooted in Newar ritual and philosophy.
The work manifests as an open spiral route through Bhaktapur — no fixed sequence, no prescribed path. Participants walk a circuit spanning 7–28 days. Stations include: an active dust garden where volunteers rake patterns that are then erased; a makeshift cabin in various states of assembly and collapse; an empty red wheelchair before an unmarked doorway; a red-silk loom where stitching loops eternally without closure.
At the installation's centre rests a clay vessel filled with mountain spring water, unnamed — dedicated to the unborn daughter in the frame. Participants may pour in water, hold the vessel, or leave it untouched. A rotating chorus of Newar speakers recites fragmentary, colliding translations of Leif's twelve-word question — each version subtly altering the syntax of refusal.
The Collective frames Renewal not as healing but as learning to live inside the glitch — a practice of repeated return rather than transcendence. In Newar cosmology, navakaran (threading-anew, renewal) is cyclical and perpetually incomplete. The work's unfinishedness is its sacrament.