
Uma Bista
Uma Bista’s photographic series “Our Songs from the Forest,” 2018–, has achieved something of a feat—it’s captured women’s primitive, pre-patriarchal ease with their own bodies. Loosely and languidly, Bista’s sprawled female subjects mingle with forests that offer unencumbered acceptance. These woods are in Achham, a district in western Nepal infamous for chhaupadi, the monthly practice of quarantining menstruating women inside cowsheds. Away from the forest, and closer to home, their bodies stiffen and grow mute, become repressed. They avert their gazes. And they shrink away from Bista’s camera.