Nepal’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation, the Nepal Academy of Fine Arts, the Siddhartha Arts Foundation, and the Rubin Museum of Art are honored to announce that the first-ever Nepal Pavilion will debut at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2022.

Tales of Muted Spirits – Dispersed Threads – Twisted Shangri-La is curated by artists Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung.

Tsherin Sherpa collaborates with artists from the Himalayas to both capture and problematize contradictory conceptualizations of the region–often seen through a reductive and fetishized “Shangri-La” gaze. This body of work incorporates accounts encoded in oral narratives, archival objects, and quotidian rituals to implicate an intersectional and intertwined past. These compositions draw upon motifs common across Himalayan histories–the garuda, nature spirits, ghosts–and explore how they have been adopted, muted, reappropriated, digested, and regurgitated; consequently transcending their respective valuations within Bön, Buddhist,Hindu, Western and Capitalist worlds.

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