Artistic Directors Academy in Nepal with Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung
Details
Fri, 27 December–Sun, 29 December, 2024
Nepal
Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung will bring together six explorations of art and curation during a three-day session. This gathering pays homage to land rights and Indigenous sovereignty movements, acknowledges embodied practices such as mark-making, eating and revival of Indigenous printmaking techniques as acts of resistance, and creates space to question the term “queer,” which can simultaneously embody inclusivity and solidarity while also reflecting the homogenization embedded in its use.
About Sheelasha Rajbhandari
Sheelasha Rajbhandari is an artist and curator based out of Kathmandu. Her works draw upon an embodied and speculative lineage of femininities to question the positioning of women and fluid beings across time, landscapes, and cosmologies. Her practice is a provocation to reflect beyond neo-liberal conception of time in order to decenter patriarchal structures that perpetuate cycles of industrial extraction and individual exhaustion. For her, art-making is about making space for collective action. This questioning feeds into her recent artistic and curatorial approach that recompose notions of Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, worth, and productivity.
Rajbhandari is co-curator for Tamba project at 11th Asia Pacific Triennial 2024. She is one of the curators for 17th Biennale Jogja 2023 and Colomboscope 2024 and Kathmandu Triennale 2077, Nepal Pavilion at Venice Biennale (2022), ‘Garden of Ten Seasons’ at Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2022) and ’12 Baishakh,’ Bhaktapur (2015). Her textile installation was exhibited at Kunstinstituut Melly (2023), Museum of Art and Design; NewYork (2022), Footscray Art Center; Melbourne ( 2022). Rajbhandari crafted the Dankini initiative, which prioritizes rest, play, and sensory pleasure while delving into the complex interplay between identity and structural forces. She is also the co-founder of ArtTree Nepal, an artist collective and Kalā Kulo, an arts initiative.
About Hit Man Gurung
Hit Man Gurung is an artist and curator based in Kathmandu by way of Lamjung.Gurung’s diverse practice concerns itself with the fabric of human mobilities, frictions of history, and failures of revolutions. While rooted in the recent history of Nepal, his works unravel a complex web of kinships and extraction across geographies that underscore the exploitative nature of capitalism. These narratives revolve around the lived experiences of migrants caught between a dehumanizing transnational labor-based industry and an apathetic nation-state. He furthermore invokes Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies to fundamentally reconfigure contemporary artistic praxis.
Gurung is one of the curators for 17th Biennale Jogja 2023 and Colomboscope 2024. He was co-curator for the Kathmandu Triennale 2077 (2022), Nepal Pavilion at Venice Biennale (2022), ‘Garden of Ten Seasons’ at Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2022) and ’12 Baishakh,’ Bhaktapur (2015) alongside Sheelasha Rajbhandari. He has also co-founded ArtTree Nepal, an artist collective and Kalā Kulo, an arts initiative. He has participated in exhibitions at Asian Art Biennial,Taipei (2024), SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2020); Biennale of Sydney (2020); Artspace Sydney (2019); Weltmuseum Wien (2019); Kathmandu Triennale (2017); Yinchuan Biennale (2016); ParaSite, Hong Kong (2016); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2015-16); and Dhaka Art Summit (2014, 2016, 2018, 2020).
