Artistic Directors Academy in Nepal
Details
Mon, 23 December–Mon, 30 December 2024
Nepal
Connector-Specialist #1 Ujjwala Maharjan: Tue, 24 December 2024 (Read More)
Connector-Specialist #2 Sharareh Bajracharya / Srijanalaya: Wed, 25 December–Thu, 26 December 2024 (Read More)
Connector-Specialist #3 Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung: Fri, 27 December–Sun, 29 December 2024 (Read More)
In collaboration with three connector-specialists Ujjwala Maharjan, Sharareh Bajracharya/Srijanalaya, and Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung, Artistic Directors Academy (ADA) Fellows will spend a week in Nepal for their fourth Module.
Kicking off the journey, Ujjwala Maharjan will focus on Arts/Music as Community Practice in Kathmandu and the changing roles of women in ethnic music landscapes with the case study of the Apwoh Misa project and the Tah nani Dapha programme in Nani Kirtipur.
Subsequently, a two-day reflection designed by Sharareh Bajracharya for Srijanalaya will invite a diverse group of artists and cultural workers to reflect on the format of artist-led residency in Khokana that views the key educator as place, as an entity. “What can we learn from a place, and what can a place teach us?”
At the last stroke, Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung will bring together six different explorations on curation and art ranging from evocative prints and images that document and protest for land rights and Indigenous sovereignty and urgency to safeguard to exploration of homogenisation of the term “queer” and the discomfort it might generate within spaces meant to celebrate diversity.
About Ujjwala Maharjan
Ujjwala is a Kathmandu-based poet, performer and educator. She is one of the co-founders of Word Warriors, a poetry group leading the spoken word movement in Nepal. Post her Masters in Education from the University of Pennsylvania, she has been exploring arts activism and community-based education programmes focusing on storytelling through varied creative mediums. Inspired by her students and colleagues, she started experimenting with rap during the pandemic. Collaborating with other artists, she blends Nepali ethnic music into the soundscape of punk, hip-hop and musical monologues and tells stories of women’s bodies, sexuality and liberation. Writing in English, Nepali and the ethnic minority language, Newari (Newah), she is interested in subverting the language and culture of misogyny in Nepal.
About Sharareh Bajracharya / Srijanalaya
Sharareh is a Kathmandu-based arts educator who believes in the power of the arts to make the earth tremble, loosen up for change, change that begins with expressing and listening. She is one of the founders of Srijanalaya, a nonprofit organisation in Nepal, which creates safe spaces of learning through the arts. She was a CISA 2018 Fellow at KHOJ. Her curatorial endeavour is to open up questions that have been silenced and to unlearn different forms of indoctrination. She completed her BFA in Painting and Art Education from the Kathmandu University Centre for Art and Design, her Bachelor’s in Early Childhood Development from Tufts University, and her Master’s in Education, Culture, and Society from the University of Pennsylvania.
Srijanalaya is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organisation established to create safe spaces of learning through the arts. They imagine a Nepal where every child has the tools necessary and the support to express and be heard.
A growing community of artists and educators in Nepal, they offer creative mediums as an alternative approach to rote-learning and static textbooks.
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).
