Ayushma Regmi

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  print Summer 2022

  Kathmandu Triennale 2077

  Time lost its tethering in the Kathmandu Triennale 2077. One of the central figures in artist Thảo Nguyên Phan’s part-history, part-fantasy three-channel video installation Mute Grain, 2019, dies of starvation during the harrowing 1945 famine in Vietnam. Her hungry ghost passes into a future where the dead, propelled by nothing more than the unfulfilled desire for food, do not belong. In Subash Thebe Limbu’s Ningwasum, 2022, two Indigenous time-traveling astronauts from a coming Yakthung nation returned to the present-day Himalayas. The film imagines a future in which Indigenous communities

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  picks March 26, 2019

  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.

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  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