Promises of better futures leave debilitating losses in their wake, unacknowledged and unaccounted for. What does progress cost, and who pays the price? This presentation explores how a group of young Nepali photographers is engaging with critical debates around development and prosperity in Nepal today, using photography to question dominant narratives of progress.
Eight artists from exhibitions — Who Does the River Belong To? (2024) and All That the Land Holds (2025) tell stories from across hills, forests, fields, and rivers—from Yangshila to Mukkumlung, Khotang to Sunkoshi—they document what it feels like to live through intimate violences in the name of national progress and prosperity while reminding us that land is not just a territory but a memory, inheritance, and identity.
This presentation features an excerpt from works produced by fellows in PC Fellowship 2024 and 2025. All works were shown in exhibitions — Who Does the River Belong To? and All That the Land Holds—in Kathmandu, Nepal.
NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati
NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati lives and works in Kathmandu, Nepal. She is the co-founder and artistic director of photo.circle, Nepal Picture Library, and PhotoKTM – platforms and initiatives that nourish image-making, history-telling, and dialogic engagements with diverse publics
As a cultural organizer and curator, NayanTara enjoys working collaboratively with photographers, filmmakers, researchers, writers, translators, educators, designers, organizers, and other professionals from various fields to develop multidisciplinary exhibitions, publications, commissions, workshops, and other co-productions and cultural tools. She is committed to creating possibilities for people who think, make, speak, and organize in different ways to come together in “imperfect solidarity” to learn, question, disrupt, and resist, but also work towards repair.
Sagar Chhetri
Sagar Chhetri is a Kathmandu-based visual artist and educator. He finds himself between denial and acceptance, between audacity to stop a moment in the pace of time and the curiosity of what lies within it; between the person and the personal; between politics, listening, and observing the becoming of an image-maker, a practicing educator, and an aspiring performer. He makes photographs respond to the world around him. In his works, he is thinking about the identity struggles of the people, hopes and dreams of a revolution, fragmentation, and skyrocketing prices of land.
Sagar is the Head of Learning Programs at photo.circle and PhotoKTM and was also part of the curatorial team of the PhotoKTM6.