As Photo.circle and its partners announce to organize third edition of Photo Kathmandu between 12 October and 16 November 2018, many renowned photographers and artists from around the will be in Kathmandu in the month of October.
Photo.circle and its partners announce that the third edition of Photo Kathmandu will be held between 12 October and 16 November 2018. Photo Kathmandu creates a space for conversations between the city and its public, and its pasts and its aspirations.
Supported by Shikshya Foundation Nepal, the Embassy of Switzerland in Nepal, National Geographic Society, and Pro Helvetia, the British Council is its strategic partners
According to a press release issued by Photo.circle, the festival brings together photographers and other practitioners who work with the visual medium to build and showcase projects as exhibitions, projections and various pop-ups, facilitate workshops and exchanges, join a mixed-media residency, and participate in other core and collateral programming. The festival will be anchored in the historic city of Patan. This year, it has grown to a month long event from a two-week format in its last edition, and one of its key exhibitions will be extended for 6 months.
Photo Kathmandu attempts to challenge the limits of ‘artistic intervention’ by organizing platforms and programs that create in-depth engagement with local audiences and special interest groups on socio-political topics of local relevance. A dynamic Arts and Education program led by educators Sharareh Bajracharya and Niranjan Kunwar takes this mission further.
The program will involve a group of committed young arts educators who will invite Nepali students, teachers, professional networks, and families to engage with the participating artists and projects. The festival is simultaneously launching a crowd funding campaign to fund this program.
In its third iteration, Photo Kathmandu is launching two new programs – an arts commission, for which artists were selected through an open call, and an incubator program that will bring together young photographers and related practitioners to share and discuss work and concerns about their practices. The commissioned work, “Island of Our Bodies” – a multimedia project by artists Kreepa Maskey, Irina Giri, and Sonam Choekyi Lama, explores the implications of dealing with the body through abstraction, fantasy, and the reality of the physical body.
A month-long mixed-media residency with Indian curator and art writer Veerangana Kumari Solanki and Nepali artist and curator Sujan Chitrakar has invited four artists/artist duos of varying disciplines to live and work together in Patan. Over the four weeks, Nhooja Tuladhar and Bandana Tulachan (Nepal), Marco Panzetti (Italy), Fiza Khatri (Pakistan), and Valentina Abenavoli and Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu (Italy, Turkey) will explore intersections between photography, sound, video, writing, performance, poetry and other mediums.
This year, Photo Kathmandu is working with a curatorial framework that puts a spotlight on gender, power, identity, patriarchy, and sexuality. Photo Kathmandu is sensitive to the subtle and not so subtle ways in which the intersection of these structures affect not only the world we inhabit but also the ways in which we engage with it, and will encourage engagement and conversations around these very present themes.
Among its many exhibitions and projects, the festival will feature: “The Lightning Testimonies” by Amar Kanwar (India) – a multi-channel video installation that reflects upon the history of conflict in the Indian subcontinent through experiences of sexual violence; “The Public Life of Women” co-curated by Diwas Raja Kc and NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati (Nepal) – an exhibition developed from the archival materials collected for The Feminist Memory Project by Nepal Picture Library; ““There Are No Homosexuals in Iran” by Laurence Rasti (Switzerland) – a work that questions the fragile nature of identity and gender concepts using photographs of Iranian gays and lesbians who are forced to live in anonymity; and “The Lost Head and the Bird” by Sohrab Hura (India) – a film that presents a hallucinatory and chaotic reading of India’s current socio-political climate.
The festival will also hold several workshops by local and visiting practitioners including Katrin Koenning(Germany), Pablo Bartholomew(India), Kishor Sharma(Nepal),Uwe H. Martin (Germany), Shikhar Bhattarai (Nepal), Robert Godden (UK), Kevin WY Lee (Singapore), and Sumit Dayal (India).
The festival will feature curatorial collaborations with Anshika Varma (India), Samantha Reinders (South Africa), and Asmita Parelkar (India), among others.
Photo Kathmandu is organized by photo.circle, a platform for photography based in Kathmandu founded in 2007. Through workshops, publications, exhibitions and a variety of discursive programming around the year, photo.circle nurtures voices that document and engage with social change in Nepal through the visual medium.