Nepalese Curators Hit Man Gurung and Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Vietnamese artist Van Nhi Nguyen at Plat(t)form 2023

At the annual event Plat(t)form, 42 selected international photographers and artists offer an insight into their work. During the portfolio viewing event, the artists present their works to the public and a team of experts, providing an opportunity to discover the latest trends in photography and meet young talents personally.

Plat(t)form will take place from 8-10 September 2023 at Fotostiftung Schweiz at Grüzenstrasse 45.

Hit Man Gurung is an artist and curator based in Kathmandu by way of Lamjung. Gurung’s diverse practice concerns itself with 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. These narratives revolve around the lived experiences of migrants caught between a dehumanizing transnational labor-based industry and an apathetic nation-state. He furthermore invokes Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies to fundamentally reconfigure contemporary artistic praxis.

Sheelasha Rajbhandari is an artist and curator based out of Kathmandu. Her works draw upon an embodied and speculative lineage of femininities to question the positioning of women across time, landscapes, and cosmologies. Her practice is a provocation to reflect beyond neo-liberal conception of time in order to decenter patriarchal structures that perpetuate cycles of industrial extraction and individual exhaustion. For her, art-making is about making space for collective action. This questioning feeds into her recent artistic and curatorial approach that recompose notions of Indigeneity, gender, worth, and productivity.

Vân-Nhi Nguyễn is a Vietnamese photographer and artist based in Vietnam. Her work touches on cultural identities and social concerns via aesthetic research, personal observations and theatrical staging, and in the process, proposes interpretations. Vân-Nhi holds a BA (Hons) in Graphic Design from Liverpool John Moores University, UK. Her work has been exhibited in different international institutions and festivals, namely NOOR Image, Hong Kong International Photography Festival, and Matca. She is also the recipient of the V&A Museum Parasol Foundation Prize, Aperture Portfolio Prize and the PhMuseum Women Photographer award.

Vân-Nhi will present her work at Plat(T)form in two parts: the first part is the project As You Grow Older started 2022, and the second is Come and See, which is being produced at the moment. The series includes mainly environmental portraits, with the company of some still life, landscapes, collages and archival scans and visual installations.

Follow Vân-Nhi on Instagram @vnnhi

See full program of Plat(t)form 2023 here.