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.

picks December 21, 2018

Sunita Maharjan

Space is elastic in Sunita Maharjan’s second solo exhibition, “Shared Skies.” In textile, it expands and contracts. Her works in “Marpha,” 2013, one of four series on display, showcase an abundant sprawl of high-altitude desert undulating through pastel fabrics. Meanwhile, the series “Terrace,” 2016-18, offers a glimpse of the intensity with which buildings jockey in overpopulated sections of the Kathmandu Valley. Much like a cartographer, Maharjan presents the landscape in aerial view, mapping people’s experiences with lived spaces onto fabric, padding cramped livelihoods with the comfort of