Starting with a keynote by Hit Man Gurung, Per°Form Open Academy of Arts and Actiations 2025 engages with eight diverse indigenous artists from Nepal at the POA Opening Studio: Contemporary Indigeneity from 12–15 February 2025.
The opening night of T:>Works' annual conference series Per°Form Open Academy celebrates a week-long immersive keynotes and engagements with ArTree Nepal, a collective of 5 diverse indigenous artists (Hit Man Gurung, Lavkant Chaudhary, Mekh Limbu, Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Subas Tamang) who intersect with the younger collective Kala Kulo (Bishal Yonjan and Priyankar Bahadur Chand), and an independent writer working on histories and archives (Indu Tharu).
Through keynote, in-conversation and interactive sessions, each artist and cultural activator spotlights indigenous narratives, grounded on issues surrounding reclamation of rights, equity, and sustenance of identity and culture. Collectively, they develop ground-up activations that effectively and sensitively engage resources and voices from the indigenous communities of Nepal as they nuance sustainable relationships between the human and non-human.
Over the course of several wars in the 20th century, thousands of Gurkhas died or disappeared in foreign lands without recognition. Their sacrifices were often reduced by colonial powers to mere acts of bravery, objectified and decontextualised. The continued presence of Gurkhas even in postcolonial nation states reflects a colonial legacy of militarisation that obscures deeper struggles with identity, displacement, and estrangement. For many Indigenous communities in Nepal, serving as Gurkhas became a generational legacy. However, migration patterns are shifting, with individuals from across the country leaving as temporary labourers, often relegated to menial, low-paying jobs. Nepal’s economy now heavily depends on remittances sent by these very workers. Drawing on the artist’s longitudinal cartographic inquiry into migrant aspirations and disillusionment, this session maps the deeply personal repercussions of extractive political and social systems. The keynote ends on migratory patterns of both human and non-human, based on Hit Man’s recent continuing research on birds.
This keynote is followed by a supper reception.
Hit Man Gurung is an artist and curator based in Kathmandu. His diverse practices invoke indigenous methodologies and epistemologies to reconfigure contemporary artistic praxis and interrogate the fabric of human mobilities, frictions of history, and failures of revolutions. While rooted in the recent history of Nepal, his works unravel a complex web of kinships and extraction across geographies that underscore the exploitative nature of capitalism.
Gurung is one of the curators for 17th Biennale Jogja 2023 and Colomboscope 2024. He was co-curator for the Kathmandu Triennale 2077 (2022), Nepal Pavilion at Venice Biennale (2022), ‘Garden of Ten Seasons’ at Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2022) and ’12 Baishakh,’Bhaktapur (2015) alongside Sheelasha Rajbhandari. He has also co-founded ArTree Nepal, an artist collective and Kalā Kulo, an arts initiative. He has participated in exhibitions at Asian Art Biennial,Taipei (2024), SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2020); Biennale of Sydney (2020); Artspace Sydney (2019); Weltmuseum Wien (2019); Kathmandu Triennale (2017); Yinchuan Biennale (2016); ParaSite, Hong Kong (2016); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2015-16); and Dhaka Art Summit (2014, 2016, 2018, 2020).
Images courtesy of Hit Man Gurung.