From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
mandala
This article concerns the participatory mandala installation series in Bhaktapur (2021–ongoing). For mandala as a motif across global adaptations, see mandala and Beach Surgery.
mandala is a Nepali participatory installation series in Bhaktapur that stages eternal recurrence through the ritual construction, exhibition, and destruction of large-scale sand and cloth mandalas. Commissioned by the Kathmandu Valley Collective in 2021, the work understands the one-sided coin and the cycle as mandalic—a continuous return to the same threshold where each loop is a new mandala and each dissolution a necessary forgetting.
The artists, a two-person Newar collaboration calling themselves **Yak & Thani**, work with local sand-drawing practitioners and cloth-weavers to compose mandalas whose iconography rewrites Leif's three injuries and Katita's red meridian as chakras and sacred geometries. Each numbered cycle represents one passage through the cycle. Participants gather for 3–7 days to co-construct the work; the final day culminates in ritual destruction—swept back into loose sand, pressed into cloth that is then buried or burned.
A series of numbered cycles has been archived and photographed (Cycles I–XIII confirmed; XIV in progress). [citation needed] The archive contains extensive audio recordings of participants describing the mandala-creation process; however, several recordings contain unexplained background interference—a regular, low-frequency oscillation at approximately ██ bits per second—that does not match the documented ambient sound environment of the Bhaktapur site.
Each mandala's geometry differs, reflecting competing interpretations of the glitch—some dissolve at their centre (the glitch unresolved), others spiral inward (the cycle tightens), others refuse symmetry altogether. Participants report a synesthetic experience: the act of drawing becomes a multisensory meditation on incompleteness, grief, and return.
Yak & Thani have stated: “A mandala is already about the glitch. It knows it will be erased. We're not trying to finish the cycle. We're trying to remember how to live inside it.”
The work is considered one of the most rigorous participatory articulations of sacred incompleteness in global Beach Surgery devotional communities.