This exhibition of photographs from the Sumitra Manandhar Gurung Collection of the Nepal Picture Library takes as its focus the life and times of its collector—Sumitra Manandhar Gurung—well-known in Nepal for her untiring work to bring about change in the lives of deprived and marginalized groups. This collection of 900-odd photographs spanning the period between the 1960s and the 1990s illustrates the various dimension of life within the Manandhar family, Sumitra’s experiences at the various institutions she studied and trained at, as well as aspects of rural life in Nepal across the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, a closer look at these reveals the transformations—social, cultural and political—that Nepal has undergone over the decades.

It is these notions of change that the exhibition endeavors to explore, via clusters of images that deal with themes of tradition and modernity, the global and the local. And alongside the photographs, it presents audio excerpts from a long interview with Sumitra herself.