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.
A look at our programmes
Poster Design: Tsetan Angmo
Water as Ancestor
Tsetan Angmo, Tashi Morup and Kunga Tashi Lepcha in conversation
Moderated by Rigzin Chodon
With a performance by Sonam Gyalson, and screening of ཆུ་ ཆུ་མིག་ ཅང་ཐི་། Chu Chumik Changti by Tsetan Angmo
Thursday, 30 July, 2026 | 4:30–7:30 PM
Royal Enfield Pit Stop Kharu
Join us for the opening of ཉན་ཏག་ Nyantag Hear, Here, presenting a solo exhibition of Kunga Tashi Lepcha’s ‘Children of the Snowy Peaks’ at Pit Stop Kharu with a walkthrough by the artist, followed by Ladakhi folk singer Sonam Gyalson’s performance narrativising Ladakhi ties to land and kinship and a screening of Tsetan's experimental animated documentary reinterpretting the memories and oral histories surrounding a natural spring water body. We close with open conversation and discussion on sacred ecologies, the everyday and modes of telling and holding stories.
Bios:
Kunga Tashi Lepcha is a photographer and visual artist based out of Gangtok, Sikkim. His practice centres around experimental documentary photography and in-depth research projects exploring indigenous cosmology, identity, memory and space by drawing from lived experience, to reimagine the social, spiritual, and ecological fabric of the Himalayas.
Tsetan Angmo is a visual artist and animation filmmaker from Ladakh. Her practice is rooted in storytelling through illustration, sketching, and animation, drawing inspiration from the landscapes, people, and diverse cultural traditions that surround her. Through her films, she explores emotion, memory, and human connection, creating characters and narratives that resonate with audiences.
Tashi Morup is Projects Director of the Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation, Leh. He has worked as a journalist, and ran his own weekly newspaper ‘Magpie’. His areas of research include water and glaciers and the impact of development and tourism mainly in Leh town, and music. Tashi has published several articles in national and international books and journals.
Rigzin Chodon works as an Independent Research Consultant. She is the founder of Yige Publications (2022 onwards), an independent publishing house based in Leh that aims towards bringing out literary works in different genres and languages, among other creative ventures by authors from Ladakh and the trans-Himalayan region.
Poster Design: Tsetan Angmo
Following the River
An interactive session with Kunga Tashi Lepcha and Tsetan Angmo
Thursday, 30 July, 2026 | 2:00-4:00 PM
Pit Stop Kharu
Registered event: Limited seats
Please write to info@ficart.org or message us at +918130119703 to reserve a seat.
In tandem with the opening of ཉན་ཏག་ Nyantag. Hear, Here, presenting a solo exhibition of Kunga Tashi Lepcha’s ‘Children of the Snowy Peak’, this workshop led by the artist along with Tsetan Angmo will reflect on memories, personal and shared, of rivers and river ecologies to forge collective imagination of these water bodies in the years to follow. Through storytelling, creative activities and group reflection, the session hopes to generate insights from within these Himalayan lifeworlds, of living in close proximity to river bodies today.
Kunga Tashi Lepcha is a photographer and visual artist based out of Gangtok, Sikkim. His practice centres around experimental documentary photography and in-depth research projects exploring indigenous cosmology, identity, memory and space by drawing from lived experience, to reimagine the social, spiritual, and ecological fabric of the Himalayas. He is the co-founder of The Confluence Collective, a group of scholars and visual artists focused on community building in the Sikkim-Darjeeling Himalayas. Kunga has been awarded the Prince Claus Fund CAREC Fellowship (2026), Magnum Heat Fellowship (2024), FICA and Royal Enfield’s THF Fellowship (2023), and the Amiyaprabha Chaudhuri Memorial Grant (2019).
Tsetan Angmo is a visual artist and animation filmmaker from Ladakh. Her practice is rooted in storytelling through illustration, sketching, and animation, drawing inspiration from the landscapes, people, and diverse cultural traditions that surround her. Through her films, she explores emotion, memory, and human connection, creating characters and narratives that resonate with audiences. She is deeply interested in exploring and experimenting with the medium of animation, constantly delving deeper into the creative process to discover new ways of expressing ideas and emotions. Nature, reading, watching films and sketching are integral to her creative practice, and she is rarely without her sketchbook, capturing moments and observations that often find their way into her work.