ཉན་ཏག་ Nyantag
Hear, Here
An exhibition presenting the projects and processes from recipients of The Himalayan Fellowship for Creative Practitioners 2023–24 and 2024–25.
30 July - 30 September 2026
Pit Stop Kharu, Kharu, Ladakh
A solo exhibition of Kunga Tashi Lepcha’s ‘Children of the Snowy Peak’ inaugurates the exhibition at Pit Stop Kharu, which unfolds further with an opening at Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation (LAMO) this September.
Poster Design: Tsetan Angmo
In a two-venue exhibition across Pit Stop Kharu and Ladakh Arts & Media Organisation (LAMO), the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) in collaboration with Royal Enfield presents ཉན་ཏག་ Nyantag Hear, Here featuring recipients of The Himalayan Fellowship for Creative Practitioners 2023–24 and 2024–25. Deeply informed by the Fellowship’s aims and shaped by its cohorts, past and present, this geographically-spanning exhibition, sited in Ladakh, cites the region as a locus of thought. It contends with questions of identity, home, language, and resilience as relations to attend to, asking whether listening's polysemy, its many unsettled meanings, might offer a modality of attention equal to these precarities.
Borrowing from the Ladakhi word for 'listening carefully', the exhibition is an invitation, a call to tune in. One that impels us to gather around a hearth, under a dera, at land's edge, and in mayel lyang1. Working across documentary, film, drawing, music, archival, installation, immersive and multimedia formats, it ensembles many acts of listening. In doing so, the artists and their approaches not only tend to its aural and oral dimensions; rather they harbor a wide range of meanings: intuition and premonition as states of attunement, modes of sensing and reading, embodiment and longue-durée observation—intermingling fields of experience and knowledge to produce novel perspectives aligning land, places, peoples, and other histories. Alive to the region’s tonalities, the works at turns harness voice and gesture, road-mapping and mark-making, resilient motifs and modulations, finding common ground in practices of attention.
At Pit Stop Kharu, we open with a solo exhibition of Kunga Tashi Lepcha’s ‘Children of the Snowy Peak’ that takes the 2023 GLOF event of the Teesta river, Sikkim as a key point of departure. Kunga contemplates this crisis through his explorations of the indigenous Lepcha worldview. An ongoing project that documents happenings in Dzongu valley and the lives of its inhabitants, it renders visible the voice of ancestral knowledge within stories of ongoing resistance—the river as sacred pathway and mountain as guardian deity. Presented in Kharu, it brings stories of the Teesta in conversation with the Indus in Ladakh, intertwining two great transboundary rivers and their legacies.
1. A mythical land believed to be an eternal realm for the Lepcha people of Dzongu. Courtesy Kunga Tashi Lepcha.