From Burning Rice Fields to Urban Growth

Sujan Dangol
Title: Mandala, 2024
Material: Mixed media
Dimensions: 250 cm

Kathmandu Valley used to be known for its fertile land, and more than 80 percent of Kathmandu natives worked in agriculture. The valley’s local culture, rituals and festivals are thus inextricable from the seasons and their agricultural activities.
For this project, I have collected 54 types of grain, crops, beans, and spices native to the Kathmandu Valley. I have also collected bamboo, copper, glass, plastic, and steel utensils to represent the shift from an agricultural to an industrial and technological era. This installation tries to show the ever-changing timeline of the valley, how our thoughts are reaching out through different materials. The last layer is found materials, objects people have discarded on the streets of Amsterdam.
The place which we call home—the Earth—is not only ours. Coexistence with animals, birds, plants, insects, water, and soil is essential for the well-being of our ecosystem. But our educational system no longer caters to the idea of the Earth as a shared home, and as a result we consider the limited space of our small families and personal belongings as our world.

Kripa Tuladhar
Title: Remembrance of Shadows, 2023
Material: Lokta paper and thread
Dimensions: Varied

In Ason, a historical neighborhood of Kathmandu, the communities’ stories are colored by their spaces and facades. I walk through its alleys, stop halfway to brush off the chaos, finding solace in Ason’s courtyards where people live collectively.
I notice a tea stall in one corner, filled with conversation with every sip the customers take, forgotten posters on a wall,  pasted on top of each other, worn curtains of a house that was once a home, and doors leading to nowhere.
Children play and claim the space, making hopscotch marks on the street, sharing laughter in a small corner, running barefoot, making that space alive.
The city becomes the canvas of its people, marked by those who have passed through it. Layers of movement from the footsteps of our ancestors, layers of change capture the fading signs, crumbling bricks and windows, and lastly, the future pushing its way against the old reshaping it: facades as a testament to time.
Cutting out these traces in paper, layering them, like the city’s layers of history, memories of the city are encapsulated in fleeting shadows.

Sagar Chhetri
Title: Brutality of Geometry, 2024
Material: Prints
Size: Varied

What is land? Where do I go to find the truth about how or when the earth, soil, water, jungle, and everything that grows above and beneath it becomes a commodity in a market?In 2020, a google search for a place I knew would be a weekend getaway, an area of waterfalls in the hills on the outskirts of the Kathmandu Valley, triggered me to begin this work. This search resulted in vast amounts of photographs of real estate for sale, of rice fields, playgrounds, river banks, steep hills, vegetable gardens, empty stretches of ample vegetation, and even forests. In bits and pieces, the oddly cut plots have drastically filled Kathmandu’s landscape over the past few decades.
This work is an experiment consisting of a collection of photos on which people, trying to sell a particular piece of land, have carved small maps of the property. These distinct geometric shapes drawn over land photographs provoke a sense of brutality that is often overlooked. As an artist, I wish to respond to and investigate this geometry of brutality in depth.

Sunita Maharjan
Title: Curtain of Change, 2024
Material: Stencil print on handmade cotton
Dimensions: 223.52 x 55.88 x 203 cm

My hometown, Kirtipur, once was a small, predominantly farming community. Rapid urbanization and industrial growth have eroded not only local production but also the indigenous knowledge of farming and weaving – a life skill once vital for creating necessary goods.
The presence of Tribhuvan University, Nepal’s first, since 1959 occupying the ancestral lands of the indigenous Newa, has greatly changed the town. Students flock here for study,  shifting the town’s population and economy. For lack of housing on campus, students rent rooms in local homes, turning single houses into multi-level dwellings, each floor housing temporary residents. This continuous influx of students has altered the fabric of Kirtipur – both figuratively and literally.
Colorful curtains adorn the windows, representing the individuality of these temporary occupants. A window without a curtain signals an empty room, awaiting new inhabitants, and symbolizes the transient nature of life in Kirtipur today. With Curtain of Change I want to document and comment on the evolving identity of my hometown, where urbanization, industrialization, and educational migration intersect, leaving both visible and invisible marks on the community.

Liesbet Bussche
Title: Building Rings, 2024
Material:  Clay blocks, brick dust
Dimensions: Varied

I put on my safety glasses and mentally recharge for another day of sensory overload. I grind, I sand. I feel the stone’s robustness as the diamond wheel slowly carves through the fired clay, I perceive its fragility when a splinter jumps off the edge. I smell the dust invading my skin’s pores, stone chips crunch under my shoes. Gradually, the brick’s potential becomes more visible, and the robust angular stone morphs into a forceful undulating figure.” — from I Grind, I Sand, research text, 2024

Building Rings is part of my doctoral research in which I explore urban materiality through interaction with seemingly solid objects such as clay blocks used in structural work. They have many advantages (less raw material, simpler manufacturing process, better thermal resistance), but they are not frost-resistant. Consequently, they cannot be used for exterior walls and are normally never visible, although they occupy a significant place in the (Belgian and Dutch) built environment. Utilizing the ornamental potential hidden in this building material, I grind and sand them into signet rings whose appearance is shaped by the exchange between maker and material.

This doctoral research is funded by the Special Research Fund (BOF) of Hasselt University (BOF20DOC01).

Maartje Smits
Title: Wild Bees in the Netherlands, 2024
Material: Letterpress prints on paper
Dimensions: 35 x 51 cm
Title: The Hive I’ve Lost, 2024
Material: Beeswax
Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 22.7 cm

During the frenzy in 2012 about the sudden disappearance of honeybees in Europe, I became a beekeeper, hoping it would help. Recently I learned that honeybees were making life difficult for the wild bee species, whose numbers are rapidly declining. Just as with the Kathmandu Valley, the Dutch landscape has been hollowed out and built up. Food and nesting places for flying pollinators are scarce, so trying to save one species can mean the demise of another.
Wild Bees in the Netherlands is a series of prints, representing the Red List of Wild Bees in the Netherlands. To emphasize the poetic beauty of these names before they will be lost to us, I set their names in lead type, letter by letter, printing the lists on a printing press.
After one of my colonies of honeybees died, I took the combs these bees had created over the years, melted them, and collected the fluid wax in an empty iced tea carton. The Hive I’ve Lost is a once vibrant, bustling colony, transformed into a still solid block.

Renate Schwarz
Title: Jars of Then and Now, 2024
Photo Prints: Adaptation and Tradition (4 prints), 2024
Material: Clay, plastic taps, clay taps
Dimensions: Jars 95 x 65 cm and 45 x 35 cm
Prints 80 x 65 cm

Water seems (and sometimes is) endless. It flows in abundance from the high mountains, or falls as torrential rains, as it did in September 2024 when a large part of Kathmandu Valley was flooded, reminding us of nature’s force and our impact on the climate.
In prehistoric times, glacial meltwaters brought sediments of clay to the valley, creating the fertile soils for harvests upon which this contemporary metropole was built. The transformation of the Kathmandu Valley has struck me ever since my first visit in 1984. What a mega tsunami of change has come over this valley! How do the local communities and individuals cope with traditional and contemporary situations, how do they adapt, renew, preserve?
As an artist, the local pottery and its many varied applications caught my attention. Clay, water, and heat, the prime materials with which local potter communities emerge, creating bricks and decorations for temples and houses; their pots, bowls, vessels for daily use were instrumental to the development of habitation.
Water, clay, and the craftsmanship of the potter are a precious triangle. With these sculptures, I express their delicate balance.

Erna Anema
Title: Moraines to Clay, 2024
Material: Clay, oil paint on canvas
Dimensions (total): 260 x 520 x 500 cm

In my installation, I want to take you on a journey from the pressed clay circles of the Kathmandu Valley supported by sculptures representing the moraines to the towering ice giants of the Himalayas, which are represented on the left wall in sculptural forms.
In the painting, a moraine gapes in the ice of a glacier in the Himalayas, filled with the rubble that the glaciers carried down. Rivers transported silt and clay to the valley. Due to the slow flow of the water, the finer particles, such as clay, settled at the bottom of the lake that filled the valley until 30,000 years ago. This process led to the deposits of thick layers of clay, which made fertile land for agriculture and urban development. Bricks became industry; the rice fields made way for buildings.
My installation concludes with two clay tiles, resourced from one of the valley’s remaining fertile rice fields.
In the clay of the Kathmandu Valley, I found the connection to my recent series of ‘moraine paintings’. During a five-week working period at the ceramics workshop of Dil Bahadur in Thimi, I was able to make that connection tangible and visible, culminating in this installation.