A new group exhibition has unfolded at Takpa Gallery, inviting viewers into a realm where vision and voice converge with striking intensity. Within its luminous walls, a constellation of esteemed artists gathers, each presenting works that are at once mesmerizing and provocatively demanding. The collection does not merely seek admiration; it asks for contemplation. Every canvas, every form, bears the unmistakable imprint of its maker’s inner language- distinct, deliberate, and deeply personal. The exhibition is from 28th February till the 28th of March.
The exhibition has been thoughtfully curated by Amrit Karki, a celebrated figure renowned for his uncompromising and intellectually charged performance art. His curatorial presence is palpable throughout the show, weaving together diverse artistic vocabularies into a resonant dialogue that challenges perception and expands the boundaries of contemporary expression.
Among the participating artists, Pratima Thakali offers a tender and evocative body of work titled “In Play, There Are No Borders.” In this luminous series, she traces the delicate threshold between memory and movement, where recollection breathes and gestures refuse to stand still. Her photographic memoirs do not treat childhood as a distant, sealed chapter of time; rather, she approaches it as a living current- spontaneous, instinctive, and universally felt.
Within her frames, children emerge not merely as subjects but as quiet storytellers. Their fleeting gestures, half-formed smiles, and absorbed silences unfold like unspoken narratives that travel beyond culture, geography, and era. The innocence of play- those moments suspended between laughter and contemplation- is rendered with poetic sensitivity. Even the hushed pauses, the subtle stillness between bursts of motion, become charged with meaning. Through these shared and simple acts of play, Thakali reveals a profound commonality of human experience, reminding us that memory itself is a form of movement- returning, reshaping, and reawakening.
In striking contrast, Siddhant Rai presents a conceptual intervention through his neon text installation, where the phrase “Something Something” glows with deliberate insistence. Bathed in shifting hues of electric light, the work invites viewers into a space of repetition and linguistic ambiguity. The word something becomes both anchor and enigma- continually pointing back to itself, transformed through variations in color, punctuation, and typographic rhythm.
As the word repeats, it lingers. It pulses. It delays its own resolution. Meaning gathers only to thin and dissolve, hovering delicately between presence and absence, assertion and emptiness. The luminous text resists a fixed interpretation; instead, it becomes an experience -an echo that reverberates within the viewer’s perception. Through this play of light and language, Rai exposes the fragile architecture of meaning itself, where what is unsaid often speaks the loudest.
Another compelling presence in the exhibition is Nabin Nalbo, who titles his body of work “Hometown.” These drawings arise from the landscapes of his childhood- echoes of a place where memory first took root and identity quietly formed. Rooted in the hills of Taplejung, particularly Lingtep, his works carry the stillness and sincerity of rural life. They are not merely depictions of a village; they are meditations on belonging.
Nalbo reflects that he has drawn upon images dating back thirty to thirty-five years-visual fragments preserved in time. Among these, the portraits of women hold particular tenderness. They represent his sisters immersed in their daily toils, their resilience woven into the rhythm of ordinary life. There is no grand spectacle here-only the understated beauty of simplicity: terraced fields, weathered homes, and lives shaped by labor and love. Through these quiet renderings, Nalbo transforms memory into a living archive, where the personal becomes universal and the past continues to breathe within the present.
In a strikingly different material language, Meena Kayastha engages the tactile and the industrial. Her sculptural practice emerges from an intimate dialogue with discarded mechanical remnants and found objects-materials once deemed useful, now cast aside. She is drawn to that fragile threshold between function and abandonment, where matter lingers in quiet suspension, stripped of purpose yet heavy with potential.
Through processes of accumulation, tension, and reconstruction, Kayastha assembles hybrid forms that oscillate between fragmentation and cohesion. Her gestures are both intuitive and deliberate; she allows the materials to negotiate their own equilibrium, as though each fragment carries a will of its own. The transformation demands time, labor, and patience-an alchemical reimagining of debris into form.
In her hands, the discarded object becomes a site of inquiry. She questions impermanence: how value erodes, shifts, and is reborn. An object once reduced to scrap regains resonance through artistic intervention, acquiring new meaning and presence. Her works gently destabilize the hierarchy between the sacred and the ordinary, suggesting that reverence can emerge from ruin. Born from fragments and remnants, her sculptures carry a distinct aura—an energy shaped by memory, erosion, and renewal- where the abandoned finds voice once more.
The works of Sujan Dangol unfold the city as a living nexus of identity-an intricate weave of memory, architecture, and spirit. Through his careful rendering of Newar collective houses, he presents structures that bridge the physical and the metaphysical, binding space and time within their brick-lined courtyards and shadowed alleys. Architecture becomes more than motif; it becomes testimony. The dense settlements, rising in layered geometries, evoke both intimacy and quiet melancholy-a subtle sense of loss that lingers in the changing rhythms of urban life.
In his meditative reconstruction of gullies and communal dwellings, Dangol does not merely depict a city; he rebuilds it stroke by stroke, honoring the communal ethos embedded within its walls. The repetition of windows, the cadence of rooftops, and the silent congregation of homes suggest a shared breath- an architecture of belonging that resists erasure even as time presses forward.
Equally evocative is the work of Sandhya Silwal, who shapes entire universes from the fragility of paper. With meticulous precision, she employs intricate paper-cuts to conjure cosmic expanses, where absence becomes form and emptiness carries presence. Her works appear delicate, almost ephemeral, yet they hold an astonishing resilience-much like nature itself, tender in appearance yet enduring in essence.
Through rhythmic triangular incisions, she constructs a sacred geometry that converges toward a meditative center. At the heart of these compositions rests an image suggestive of primordial origin-the quiet pulse of creation unfolding from stillness. Light filters through the cuts, casting shifting shadows that animate the work, as though the universe itself were breathing through its fragile surface.
The exhibition as a whole stands distinct in its seamless intermingling of art and imagination. Diverse in medium yet unified in spirit, it becomes a site where memory, matter, language, and cosmos converge-each artist contributing a singular voice to a resonant collective dialogue.
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