From Soil to Spirit : Small Rituals of Coming Together

As fluid systems of movement once tied to ecosystems and seasonal cycles grow rigid, how have migrations—internal, transregional, and international—reshaped the lives of those rooted in the land, forests, and rivers? How do people from farming and pastoral traditions navigate fractured knowledge of soil, plants, animals, and spirits?  

How has the homogenization of the term “queer” impacted kinship structures, as well as non-binary and fluid expressions of gender and sexuality in Indigenous and vernacular cultures? How do we carry fragmented ancestral memories and incomplete stories of healing while navigating identity, belonging, anxiety, inferiority, and imposter syndrome?  

In an enforced patriarchal, binary, capitalist world, control over land and bodies has long reinforced power. Can we come together—sharing meals, gathering around fires, and engaging in meaningful conversations—to imagine a world that challenges dominant narratives? A world that embraces diverse ways of being, loving, and relating, beyond erasure and dismissal?  

While honoring past and present individuals and movements, can we share the stories passed down by elders and found kins? Can we acknowledge the power of small rituals of coming together, of friendships, of moments of rest that externalize our internal struggles?  

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 the Tamba project at 11th Asia Pacific Triennial 2024. She is one of the curators for 17th Biennale Jogja 2023 and Colomboscope 2024. She co-curated the Kathmandu Triennale 2077, Nepal Pavilion at Venice Biennale (2022), ‘Garden of Ten Seasons’ at Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2022) and ’12 Baishakh,’ Bhaktapur (2015) alongside Hit Man Gurung. Her textile installation was exhibited at Kunstinstituut Melly (2023), Museum of Art and Design; NewYork (2022), Footscray Art Center; Melbourne ( 2022). Her installation in the traveling exhibition “A beast, a god and a line” (2018-2020) was presented at Para Site, Hong Kong; TS1, Yangon; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Kunsthall, Trondheim; and MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai. She has also been an artist in residence at the Bellas Artes Projects (2019) and Para Site (2017). As a part of her collective, she has been a part of Dhaka Art Summit (2020) and Biennale of Sydney (2020). Rajbhandari crafted the Dankini initiative, which prioritizes rest and sensory pleasure while delving into the complexity of  identity and structural forces. She is also the co-founder of ArtTree Nepal, an artist collective and Kalā Kulo, an arts initiative.

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 co-curator for the Tamba project at 11th Asia Pacific Triennial 2024. He 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 SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2020); Biennale of Sydney (2020); Artspace Sydney (2019); Weltmuseum Wien (2019); Kathmandu Triennale (2017); Yinchuan Biennale (2016); Para Site, Hong Kong (2016); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2015-16); and Dhaka Art Summit (2014, 2016, 2018, 2020). 

A partnership with Pro Helvetia & One Gee in Fog.