Posted on 06, Feb 2020

Nepal Picture Library at India Art Fair 2020

Nepal Picture Library was invited at the India Art Fair 2020, 30 Jan – 2 Feb 2020.

We would like to thank the @indiaartfair team, friends in Delhi and everyone who visited our booth, showed interest in our work and supported the @nepalpiclibrary

On view,

The Public Life of Women
A Feminist Memory Project

To become public is to be seen and accounted for in history. The journey of Nepali women from within the boundaries of domesticity to the openness of public life is a move from obscurity to memory. This exhibition showcases materials gathered by Nepal Picture Library in its effort to create a dedicated women’s archive. It rides on the feminist impulse to memorialize women’s pasts in the belief that their historical visibility will advance the case for liberation.

This multi-part exhibition is an act of willing Nepali women en masse into public memory. It flashes instances from the past when women have taken on political struggle, addressed assemblies, paved new paths through education, published and shaped opinion, traveled and described the world, become figures of authority, and broken social norms. What we see is a view of how publicness itself has emerged as a key feminist strategy in Nepal.

Juju Bhai Dhakhwa Collection

Through an endearingly personal lens, Juju Bhai Dhakhwa invites us to get to know his community in Nagbahal, a neighborhood tucked into the deep historic folds of the city of Patan. Dhakhwa was a photographer by passion. His photos embody an effortless snapshot aesthetic and reflect his adventurous spirit. They capture the communal alongside the familial and a chorus of faces greet us time and again, becoming lively characters in a fluid intersection between the private realm of his family and the public realm of festivities and excursions. His propensity for experimentation and documentation of his own life and lives around him provides a record of the transformation of his community as shaped by the political and economic transformations of Nepal in the 60s and 70s.