Thinking Contexts and Conversations

In this episode, NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati and Yasmine Eid Sabbagh juxtapose their experiences to speak about the breadth of their works which converge on common spheres of archival images, research and conversations. In context of her long-term project with the inhabitants of Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyr, Lebanon, Eid-Sabbagh speaks about letting multiple voices co-exist and contradict each other in order to make conflicts and tensions visible. Kakshapati addresses the visibility-invisibility of Caste in a post-civil conflict Nepal, as she retrospect on the process and the trans-disciplinary approach in building the work, ‘Dalit: A Quest for Dignity’, published in 2018 by the Nepal Picture Library. Building an understanding of the narratives of the past, rematerializing images into other sensory formats (like texts, performances, etc) and generating knowledge around it, the conversation glides into thinking about the afterlife of such works and imagining different futures of archives.

To know more about ‘A Photographic Conversation from Burj al-Shamali Camp’, please visit here and about ‘Dalit - A Quest for Dignity’, here.

NAYANTARA GURUNG KAKSHAPATI

NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati lives in Kathmandu, Nepal and works at the intersections of visual storytelling, research, pedagogy, and collective action. In 2007, she co-founded photo.circle; an independent artist-led platform that facilitates learning, exhibition making, publishing and a variety of other trans-disciplinary collaborative projects for Nepali visual practitioners. In 2011, she co-founded Nepal Picture Library; a digital archiving initiative that works towards diversifying Nepali socio-cultural and political history. NayanTara is also the co-founder and Festival Director of Photo Kathmandu, an international festival that takes place in Kathmandu every two years. She is a 2020- 2022 Jane Lombard Fellow, presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School.

Photo Credit: Sagar Chetri

Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh

Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh has a background in photography. She combines research, conversational, image and (meta)archival practices to reflect on the agency of photographs and notions of collectivity and power. One of her long-term projects explores the impossibilities of representation, through a negotiation process around a potential digital archive assembled in collaboration with inhabitants of Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyr, Lebanon. In 2018, she received her PhD from the Institute of Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Eid-Sabbagh has been a member of the Arab Image Foundation (http://arabimagefoundation.org) since 2008. She was a 2018/2019 fellow at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht.

Photo Credit: Archival