The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) and Royal Enfield present

ཉན་ཏག་ Nyantag
Hear, Here

Projects and processes from recipients of The Himalayan Fellowship for Creative Practitioners 2023–24 and 2024–25.

With Arieno Kera, BERE Collective, Community Radio Henvalvani, Millo Ankha, Kesang Thakur, Shikargah Collective, Shyam Lal and Soujanyaa Boruah, Tsering Motup Siddho, Tsetan Angmo, Veecheet Dhakal, Wasim Ashoor and Zainab at at Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation (LAMO)

4 - 30 September 2026
Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation (LAMO), Ladakh

Nyantag: Hear, Here brings together projects and processes by recipients of The Himalayan Fellowship for Creative Practitioners across the 2023-24 and 2024-25 editions. A solo project featuring Kunga Tashi Lepcha is also on view at Pit Stop Kharu.

This geographically-spanning exhibition, sited in two venues across Ladakh, cites the Himalayan region as a locus of thought. It explores questions of identity, home, language, and resilience, asking for deeper forms of listening to the urgencies being articulated in the region.  

Borrowing from the Ladakhi word Nyantag which invites us to listen carefully, the exhibition is a call to tune in. One that impels us to gather around a hearth, under a dera, at land’s edge, and in mayel lyang. Working across documentary, film, drawing, music, archival, installation, immersive and multimedia formats, it is an ensemble of many acts of listening. The artists not only tend to aural and oral dimensions, rather their projects open to a wide range of meanings. They harness intuitions and premonitions as states of attunement, as well as modes of sensing and reading. They illuminate fields of experience and embodied knowledge, producing critical perspectives that align land, people and histories.

At LAMO, the works consider the abundance present in landscapes the artists are rooted in, alongside addressing the precarities they are facing. Staging a conversation on the Himalayas, oral tradition and indigenous knowledge of the Apatanis and Tenyimie Nagas are braided together via material and touch, while Boro songs and practices from the hills of Baokhungri record acts of reverence and explore the terms in which they intersect with everyday ways of living. The narratives around infrastructure in places like Lahaul and Kashmir and on rivers like Teesta and Henval also open to alternate sightlines, to lived realities arising from these accelerated developmental projects.

Across the exhibition, artists resist easy answers, lingering on the abstract and performative acts of storytelling. Forces that have historically shaped and continue to transform Ladakh are metabolised through the Changra, a folk tale of Shawa Chumik and shifting configurations of the Ladakhi Kitchen. Community is interpreted in different registers: through cooperative practices, in folk memory, and as a work in progress. Shikargah Collective's film stands as a living archive, offering renewed meanings to the processes involved in the performance and afterlife of Bhand Pather. Project Tension reconsiders the dera as both a resting site and a space of dialogue, reclaiming ethnographic research as a practice of care led by the pastoral communities themselves.

Together, they envision listening as an active engagement, as a way of remembering and becoming stories, as capable of generating new congregations and hence, potentially propelling new sets of relations. The exhibition creates conditions for a shared listening and resonance, bringing various contexts and landscapes from across the Himalayan region into conversation with Ladakh. We warmly invite you to be part of this collective listening.