$0.00
- Softcover with a dust jacket
- 104 pages
- 39 colour photographs
- 170 x 220 mm
- Limited edition of 700 copies
- ISBN 9782365114509
- English, French
- Oct 2025
With a photographic print signed by the artist
For Arhant Shrestha, photography is a way of exploring the invisible. Although Nepal introduced anti-discrimination reforms in 2007 and recognized a third gender in 2013, homophobia still exists, and with it, violence.
A victim of homophobic assault, Arhant Shrestha uses images to conjure up fear of others and judgment. Here, in carefully staged fictional scenes, he photographs members of Kathmandu's queer community, offering a counterpoint to candid flash photos of crowds of ultra-masculine men at traditional festivals. He questions our perception of masculinity, our relationship to appearance, intimacy, and otherness. His photographs immerse us in this nightlife, where identities are revealed, blurred, and confronted, and where gender categories become porous. Scenes of tenderness mingle with others where people size each other up and confront each other. The chiaroscuro lighting betrays a latent violence and evokes the darkness of Caravaggio's paintings: the light contrasts sharply with the areas of shadow to reveal the bodies. The tight framing gives the individuals a strong physical presence—hands, faces, gestures, and gazes are captured in the moment of the collective. Pages from Arhant Shrestha's diary, written after his assault, punctuate the sequence of images and mark the stages of his reappropriation of identity.
This series is accompanied by an interview between Arhant Shrestha and Coco Capitán—artist and jury president—with Simon Baker, curator; as well as an essay by Alona Pardo, curator and director of the Arts Council Collection, which questions representations of masculinity; and a new short story by British writer Deborah Levy, a great dramatist of intimate and secret relationships, inspired by this series.
Born in Kathmandu in 1999, Arhant Shrestha left his hometown at the age of eighteen to study photography at Bard College in New York. Photography became a privileged means of exploring intimacy and revealing secret worlds. Among his early series, Between Space and Memory (2021) showed the complexity of Kathmandu, to which he had little access at the time, as his family, from a privileged background, wanted to protect him from the vicissitudes of city life. His images reveal the multiple layers of Nepalese society and explore issues of masculinity and identity. They were exhibited in 2022 at the Kathmandu Triennale and in 2023 in New Delhi. His exhibitions at 7L and Villa Noailles this fall will be his first presentations in Europe.
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