How art can connect, repair, and represent
Three conversations with artists from the sixth edition of PhotoKTM
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. This is Issue 212 of Kalam Weekly, the only newsletter you need to keep updated with everything happening in Nepal.
This week, we have something different for you — three interviews/essays from three different writers. The three of us sat down with three different visual artists whose works are on display at PhotoKTM, the international photography festival that opens today. I sat down with Palestinian visual artist yasmine eid-sabbagh, Ritu Rajbanshi with Nepali artist Manjit Lama, and Ishika Thapa with the Swiss-Haitian artist Sasha Huber.
(Image: Samagra Shah)
In this newsletter:
Lives both temporary and permanent: Manjit Lama and Ritu Rajbanshi
Memory for forgetfulness: yasmine eid-sabbagh and Pranaya Rana
Repairing the past: Sasha Huber and Ishika Thapa
Lives both temporary and permanent
By
I was ten minutes late to meet Manjit Lama at The Yellow House, a tranquil café tucked away in Sanepa under a large jacaranda tree. But it turned out that I was right on time as Lama showed up just then in a PhotoKTM snapback.
Manjit is a visual artist whose work is being displayed at the sixth edition of the PhotoKTM festival, and I was there to talk to him. He shook my hand and expressed just how excited he was to be interviewed for the very first time. I too was thrilled. I write sporadically and get to publish even less so. We were both jittery, so we decided to elevate that experience and ordered coffee. It was four in the afternoon and more than half the city was on the roads outside, but Manjit’s day was far from over. He listed three different things that had been put on hold for our conversation — quality-checking screening projection files for the upcoming European Union Film Festival, editing a video for PhotoKTM, and putting the final touches on his own exhibit for the opening.
Manjit Lama. (Image: Amit Machamasi)
“I worked as part of the video editing team in 2018,” he said when I asked him about his journey with the biennial festival. He recalled enjoying everything — the stories, the larger-than-life displays of art on the streets of the valley, and even the behind-the-scenes administrative work. I felt the same way. I, too, played a small part in the fourth edition of PhotoKTM as part of its arts and education team.
I asked if the 2018 edition of the festival was what inspired him to take part as an artist. Manjit shook his head. “I did not even have my own camera then,” he said. It was clear that exhibiting in an international festival had never been a part of his plan.
But after completing a post-production gig for Everest Challengers, an international game show, he earned himself a camera. “I saw an A6500 camera and made a deal to do post-production work on an episode in exchange for the camera,” he said, recalling his spur-of-the-moment decision. In 2022, Manjit thus acquired his very own Sony Alpha A6500.
Manjit grew up in the Ramhiti ‘squatter’ settlement, located near Boudha. Ramhiti, one of the oldest such settlements in Kathmandu, has become a model of community-led development, and it is there that Manjit first encountered photography. While in school, he and his classmates needed a passport-sized photograph for their School Leaving Certificate exams. But there were 32 of them, and four copies of a picture cost Rs 100. “For us, that was a lot of money. So, my friends managed to get a camera, and we set up a curtain backdrop to print out everyone’s pictures ourselves. That cost us Rs. 10 each, and it was the first time I earned money through photography,” he recalled.
Perhaps they were the first photographers from Ramhiti, but Manjit hopes that he will not be the last. His exhibition, Permanent and Passing, is about life in Ramhiti, a community that does not appear on any official maps, one that has a precarious existence, always fearing eviction. Ramhiti, like nearly 70 other informal settlements in Kathmandu, has always been treated as a burden by the state. Politicians are hyper-focused on the legal status of ‘squatters’, often forgetting that these are people with full lives. The grey existence left such a mark that Manjit’s grandfather changed his legal name to thai-asthai, which translates to permanent-temporary. But his grandfather did not just teeter between the permanent and the temporary. He had a life of his own. He was a carpenter, so well known among the locals that he was called Sikarmi Baa. “People probably still know him by that name,” Manjit said proudly.
Yet, amidst this oscillating sukumbasi narrative set out in the public, Lama’s childhood was deeply tied to the arts inside the squatter settlement. His fondest memories are of watching plays, drawing and painting through community programs run by organizations like Lumanti Support Group for Shelters and Nepal Basobas, and exploring the world like children do.
(Images: Amit Machamasi)
But before his first camera, he’d only looked outwards. In 2024, with a camera and a coveted space at the Introduction to Storytelling workshop organized by photo.circle, he was encouraged by his mentors to look inwards. “I took my mother to Ason, to where she grew up,” he says of his first real photographic introspection. There, he sought to understand their bond more deeply — to try and see who she was beyond her memory. They spent time together, recreating old photographs and taking new ones.
Lama — despite his wild stories of pilfering donation boxes for money to play games at cyber-cafés at eight, winning gold medals in various karate styles by fourteen, and living with the constant fear of losing his home to the state — has a knack for capturing softness. “I grew up hesitant to tell people where I lived. When someone asked, I told them I lived in Bouddha. I gave different addresses to different people… always vague,” he said when I asked what it was like to look back at Ramhiti through his viewfinder as an adult.
Years later, that hesitation has become the centrepiece of his first-ever exhibition, not because the stigma has vanished but because Manjit no longer wants to take part in the state’s erasure.
“We exist and we thrive,” he said.
Lama invites viewers of Permanent and Passing to explore what the word ‘sukumbasi’ entails — the constant fear of being evicted, the struggle to be seen, the culture, and the community within. He wants the exhibit to be a step towards a different kind of upbringing for all the kids currently living in Ramhiti. All of them will be there to see themselves depicted intimately and honestly — a recognition of their lives as full as anyone else’s, not just as sukumbasi.
Manjit Lama’s exhibition, Permanent and Passing, will be on display at the Nepal Art Council from November 14 to December 14, 10 am to 6 pm.
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Memory for forgetfulness
by
yasmine eid-sabbagh and I are sitting on the first floor of The Yellow House in Sanepa, discussing war, conflict, memory, and storytelling.
“Palestine is spoken about so much, but we barely speak about Congo, we barely speak about Sudan, even though millions of people have been displaced and killed,” she says. “Why is Palestine important today? Why does it resonate with different localities? Because Palestine has brought clarity. It has revealed the ugliness, the impunity, the injustice, the fact that human rights are not for all humans, the complete hypocrisy of the West.”
yasmine, a Palestinian artist, is reflecting on the theme for this year’s PhotoKTM festival — Global South solidarities. She is an “invited interlocuter” at the festival, resisting the label of curator, even though she has been deeply engaged with the curatorial team behind the sixth edition of PhotoKTM, a biannual festival that brings photography and visual art to the streets and gallis of Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur.
(Images courtesy yasmine eid-sabbagh and Rozenn Quéré)
yasmine’s work engages deeply with the memory, trauma, and displacement of the Palestinian people. Her exhibition at the festival is a visual narrative based on the lives of four Palestinian sisters, yasmine’s aunts. She traces their displacement from Haifa to Jerusalem, to Ramallah, to Syria, to Lebanon, to Egypt, and all over the world. It is a history of a family, but also the history of a century of war and conflict. It is precisely the kind of work that PhotoKTM and the Nepal Picture Library have been doing here in Nepal, turning history on its head by letting personal stories speak to collective experiences.
“By looking into ordinary lives, we give them space to be remembered, and that is a very political thing, to say that there is not one history. What we are interested in is writing histories from below, giving value to the lives of every human being,” says yasmine.
Much of Nepali history has been written from outside. The world first heard of Nepal through the writings of foreign missionaries, colonial soldiers, and academics. While these works are not without merit, they carry the burden of their authors’ missions — evangelizing, conquering, understanding. Often, they sought to write a specific kind of history, one that remembers certain figures and forgets all others.
“History admires and records certain lives but leaves out others. Why would we leave anyone out?” asks yasmine. “This is exactly what justifies a genocide, where some lives are more valuable than others.”
yasmine’s work is rooted in this very personal history of the attempted erasure of her people. She has spent 25 years documenting and archiving Palestinian histories and stories. One of her long-term projects explores collective memory and representation through an archive created in collaboration with the inhabitants of Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyr in Lebanon. Her work co-creates memories with her collaborators, actively shaping how things will be remembered. It is an exercise in agency, in reclaiming one’s own history and resisting the violence of narrative totality imposed from outside.
In Nepal, even recent events are already being molded by the media, both local and international. The narrative behind the Gen Z protests of September 8 and 9 is being shaped as we speak. The violence and arson of September 9 are being presented in isolation, as if the state did not kill 21 young Nepalis just the day before during a peaceful protest. The international media and local forces are more concerned with the spectacle of Singha Durbar on fire, rather than holding those who gunned down unarmed peaceful protestors accountable.
yasmine saw the same thing happen in the wake of October 7. The international media picked up and spread hasbara about how Hamas had beheaded babies, burned babies alive in an oven, and carried out systematic rape and sexual violence. All of these accusations were later debunked, but not before they had been lodged into the public imagination. In fact, yasmine says, these heinous crimes were ones that Israelis themselves had committed against Palestinians. Every accusation a confession.
To resist, we in the Global South must tell our own stories, says yasmine. We must find ways to speak, record, and remember.
“We might not be able to fight the huge media machine, but it is very necessary to try. We need our own storytelling to give back dignity, strength, and confidence to the younger generation,” she says.
But our ability to tell our own stories is often limited. Festivals like PhotoKTM rely on donors, primarily from the West, and such support often comes with strings attached. As the festival organizers found out this year, donors did not like the idea of artists talking about Palestine or even the ongoing dispute over a cable car to Mukkumlung in east Nepal. But apolitical art is an oxymoron; everything is political.
yasmine agrees: “Whatever we do, how we position ourselves, how we use money, what we buy, everything is political. The possibility of being apolitical is as much a myth as peace or democracy.”
(Images courtesy yasmine eid-sabbagh and Rozenn Quéré)
Storytelling, too, is a political act. Who tells the story is often just as important as the story itself. But storytelling, photography, and archiving are all as much about what is left out as what is left in. yasmine is comfortable with this. Nothing is ever complete; nothing ever provides the full picture. Everything is in a process of becoming.
“I prefer repository to archive, actually,” she says. “An archive is something institutional. Things go into a repository, but it doesn’t have the pretension of being complete.”
For yasmine, a photograph is not just an image but a multi-layered object with embodied and disembodied layers. Photographs have intangible emotional layers attached to them, whether the original image exists anymore or not, what Roland Barthes once called the punctum — a detail that pierces the viewer, evoking an unexpected emotional connection. A photograph can be encountered in multiple ways, not just visually, says yasmine.
Do you hope that viewers in Kathmandu will take away this kind of emotional affect from your work, I ask.
“I have no expectations,” she says. “This is a very human work that is close to the heart. The idea behind my work is to contribute to popular education, to put it at the disposal of the younger generation so that they are able to grasp these understandings and make use of them. This is my hope.”
Possible and Imaginary Lives, by yasmine eid-sabbagh and Rozenn Quéré, will be on display at the Nepal Art Council from November 14 to December 14, 10am to 6pm.
Repairing the past
by
My thoughts wandered as I waited for Sasha Huber at the Yellow House in Sanepa. She would arrive any minute, so I was unsure if I should take a seat at a table or just stand near the entryway where I could see her arrive. When she finally did arrive, I was in the middle of fixing the strap back onto my shoulders. She greeted me with a welcoming smile.
We sat down to talk, and during our hour-long conversation, we discussed art, colonization, and the shared experiences that unite us in the Global South. We attempted to find threads that linked the themes of her work with Nepal’s unique history and the current socio-political climate.
Sasha Huber. (Image courtesy Sasha Huber)
Sasha is a Helsinki-based visual artist and researcher of Swiss-Haitian heritage. Her work concerns the politics of memory, care, and belonging, especially in relation to colonization. She is one of the 67 participants in the sixth edition of PhotoKTM, a biennial photo festival. This year’s theme is Global South Solidarities, an effort to foster deeper cultural understanding among artists and communities from this part of the world. In Tailoring Freedom / Pictures of a Reparation, portraits of enslaved peoples from South Carolina are layered with staples to ‘dress’ them in outfits that challenge the colonial identity enforced upon them.
Nepal was never formally colonized, even though its cultural and political consciousness bear the imprint of both Western hegemonies and geopolitical hierarchies, creating a complex postcolonial environment. When I asked Sasha if we can connect to art without a shared history, she laughed. “No, no, no,” she said and questioned me back, “Do you think that?”
For Sasha, it is less about a shared history than a shared humanity that helps us connect with art, regardless of the differences in our political histories. Art cannot be reduced to a singular, concrete meaning, but rather, it is a shared experience between the artist and the viewer that enables a deeper understanding of ourselves and our relationship with the world around us.
Sasha’s weapon of choice — an air-pressure staple gun that she uses to “dress the people” in photographs as an act of stitching or mending — is the medium for this act of connection between the past and present. From a distance, the staples resemble chain mail armor. But from closer, each staple is delicate, shining in silver. This double play of vision to create an equivocality is intentional. The staples allow the subjects in the photographs to be removed from their victimization but they also recall the violence inflicted on their bodies. For Sasha, the viscerality of her process emulates the violence that these formerly enslaved people were subjected to.
“It’s heavy, like a gun, and it sounds like a gun. I have to protect my ears and eyes when I work with it. So it’s quite a violent method, but for me it’s about the mending part of it,” she says.
Our conversation resonates with Nepal’s recent September experience. Just as Sasha seeks to symbolically “mend the colonial wound” through her art, Nepal’s youth movements and protests also represent an effort to stitch together a fractured society and reclaim agency from a state of hopelessness. At a time when Nepali youth are mobilizing through memes, infographics, and digital activism to demand accountability and reimagine the government, Sasha’s reparative approach reflects a similar spirit, using creativity as resistance and art as a means to envision justice.
“That is what happened here in Nepal. People said ok, we’ve had enough, we really have to shake things up and burn something down so that people wake up,” she says about Nepal’s recent experience.
Images courtesy Sasha Huber
Sasha’s work and philosophy maintain a delicate balance between destruction and restoration. Her work is not just aesthetic practice but a methodology of how violence, whether colonial, systemic, or symbolic, can be transformed into care and agency. It provides us with a different way of looking at progress, justice, and development, which don’t always have to be new, but can also be a reinterpretation and restoration of the old.
“Most of my work has to do with solidarity, but also with commemoration of particular people who are part of a history that has been silenced,” she says. “These histories are not told at school. There are those gaps and missing links that I’m trying to help fill.”
Sasha’s de-victimizing approach to archival violence offers a framework for how Nepal might engage with its own fractured histories, not by reproducing pain, but by reimagining it, transforming the wounds of the past into a site of resistance and empathy. Through care and solidarity, she transforms remembrance into an ethical practice, inviting viewers to recognize history as a shared, unfinished process rather than a rigid narrative.
Sasha Huber’s exhibition Tailoring Freedom / Pictures of a Reparation is on display at the Nepal Art Council from November 14 to December 14 from 10 am to 6 pm.
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