Borderlines (co-produced in collaboration with CREA) is a seven-part video series documenting how feminists work, intervene and connect the dots across the region to create knowledge in South Asia.
In 2006, at the peak of the second Jan Andolan, NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati found herself back on the streets of Kathmandu, her home in Nepal. She joined the resistance with her camera, both to bear witness, and also to document hundreds of men and women in public spaces to finally topple the monarchy through sustained struggle. What got her thinking however, was the lack of female photographers and photojournalists on the frontlines of the andolan.
This was one of the early impulses that propelled her to start the Nepal Picture Library in 2011 (under photo.circle), a seminal documentation of the everyday as discovered in people’s archives. The Feminist Memory Project that grew out of this in 2018, documents, in breathtaking detail, the lives of Nepali women. The Feminist Memory project links kinships, friendships, organising and resistance, showcasing of self and portraiture, as part of a creative continuum reflecting women’s lifeworld. Gurung’s work opens questions around the politics of memory making, and the difference between history and memory. She demonstrates how we can create an index of women’s histories without canonising certain women.
These questions also led her to centre the mundane in her work. Most importantly, she advocates for a public archive, and resists the commonsensical, artistic tendency to create an exclusive exhibition out of women’s histories. In this interview, she reiterates the need to forge intentional solidarities across histories and geographies by making archives a public and accessible reality.
