We’re super excited to announce the final selection of artists for the Photo Kathmandu Residency 2018!

  • Nhooja Tuladhar & Bandana Tulachan
  • Marco Panzetti
  • Fiza Khatri
  • Valentina Abenavoli & Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu

About the Residency

The Photo Kathmandu Residency will host 4 artists/artist duos in the historic city of Patan for a period of 4 weeks to come together and explore intersections between photography, sound, video, writing, performance, poetry and other mediums. The festival will create space for participating artists to experiment, collaborate and respond to each other and Patan as a city.
The artists will have the opportunity to work with Veeranganakumari Solanki, Sujan Chitrakar and several other local experts who will provide research and curatorial input through the residency period.

About the Guest Curators

Veeranganakumari Solanki is an independent curator and art-writer. Her curatorial experience has involved research, curating and co-curating exhibitions, writing for art publications and journals on emerging Indian, Asian and international artists and art practices; in India and internationally. Her interest lies in the manner in which interdisciplinary forms merge with art to create dialogues that travel from public spaces into private ones. She has contributed papers and articles to several international art journals and publications including Flash Art, Culture360, TAKE, Kolaj and several others. She has lectured on curating and art practices, and conducted workshops internationally at institutes such as the Siddhartha Art Foundation, Kathmandu; the Asian Contemporary Art Conference, Taipei; Icastica, Arezzo; Academia di Belle Arte, Florence

Sujan Chitrakar is a leading Nepali curator and visual artist. He is also the founder and academic coordinator of the Kathmandu University School of Arts; Nepal’s leading institution in arts education that has nurtured some of today’s most important Nepali contemporary artists. He brings over 15 years of experience in the arts and is part of the Photo Kathmandu curatorial team.

About the Artists

Fiza Khatri is an artist based in Karachi and a co-facilitator of Karachi Crit Group, a rotating art discussion group. She received her BA in Studio Art from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA. She has exhibited her work locally and internationally including in New York, Philadelphia, Lahore, and Karachi. Her work explores notions of how we live, and the dynamics of the spaces we occupy as told through the ubiquitous mundanities of everyday life. She works as an independent curator and writer, and is also a member of the feminist collective Girls at Dhabas.

Nhooja Tuladhar creates works of varied media and ideas. Sometimes things are personal; other times they’re based on issues that some of us—or all of us— go through. He was born and raised in Kathmandu and works as a director, writer, and a creative content creator. He contributes art and culture features to The Kathmandu Post and The Record, and is involved with a media production company called Fuzz Factory. He is also a member of a community art collective called Guthi.

Bandana Tulachan is a freelance illustrator based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Her professional practice is focused primarily on illustration for children’s picture books and on the use of elements of fantasy in illustrations to tell stories and to develop narratives around her own experiences and feelings. Bandana has illustrated over nine picture books for children since 2012. In 2015, she wrote and illustrated Sanu and the Big Storm (Sanu ra Adhiberi). She completed her BFA (Bachelors in Fine Arts) from Kathmandu University, Center for Art and Design.

Valentina Abenavoli is an editor and book designer, who prefers reading photography in lyrical sequence, being constantly on the edge between awareness and reveries. She is Italian, with a past life in London, and is now based in Istanbul. After a degree in photography and visual communication, a masters in book publishing and several odd jobs, she founded AKINA Books in 2012, together with Alex Bocchetto. Their publishing house produces challenging photobooks by emerging and established photographers, in limited editions and often handmade. In 2016 she published her first photobook as an author, titled Anaesthesia, followed by The Harvest, both part of an unfinished trilogy around the subjects of empathy and evil.

Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu is from Turkey and studied philosophy in Galatasaray and Sorbonne universities (BA). She worked as writer and editor in several photography projects such as MONO, Gomma Mag (Gomma Books, London) and 10×10 Photobooks Project (2019, New York). She has worked in various other art and culture institutions including The Museum of Innocence, Dirimart and Istanbul Biennial. Akseloğlu has been in charge of the exhibitions program of Operation Room Art Space (Istanbul) since 2014 and has been working for Cappadox Contemporary Art Programme since its second edition in 2016. She is currently the associate curator of Fulya Erdemci for the 4th edition of the programme titled “Silence” and co-curating the exhibition “A Pillar Of Smoke ” together with Yann Perreau for the 49th edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles in July 2018.

Graduated in Communication Sciences, Marco Panzetti (Italy, 1981) is a freelance documentary photographer, multimedia journalist and visual artist.
 His work focuses on contemporary issues related to social injustice, migration/displacement and collective identity. Although photography remains at the core of his documentary work, his visual language embraces (and constantly experiments with) different audiovisual formats (video, audio and VR) to create short documentary films, immersive multimedia pieces and art installations.
His long-term body of work on the European migrant crisis, ‘The Idea of Europe’ (2015 – 2017) received international recognition including an Honorable Mention at the 2017 Lange-Taylor Prize. Different parts composing the same work were awarded the first prize at the 2017 Migration Media Award and the 2018 National Photojournalism Award of Spain.

The residency will commence on 28th September 2018. All artists will be living and working together in Patan. We look forward to welcoming the public to a variety of pop-up and open-house events to share the resulting works and processes. Stay tuned!