Some exhibitions display work; others create an environment where the audience becomes less a viewer and more part of something unresolved. ‘Chirping of Restless Heart’, a joint show at The Kala Salon by Kathmandu-based artists Momin Pradhan and Sharmila Devi Tamang, is of the latter.

Presented as a two-person dialogue, the exhibit builds a world from leaves, yarn, birds, and beds, and invites us to take a seat. According to the artists, “chirping” refers to both the sound of a bird and the sound of a disturbed mind—something both outside and inside.

Pradhan’s installation, ‘It’s Too Early to Fall Asleep’, rests on the gallery floor in an intimate way. At the centre of the room is a mattress, bare, rumpled, personal—spread with dry leaves. The leaves are dried, greyed, and faded; they envelop the mattress more than they embrace it. On the surrounding walls, panels of moss and handmade lokta paper leaves in vivid greens, reds, and oranges hang like a fever dream of nature.

A side table comes to the fore, framing the work in the nocturnal and personal spheres. The artist has rendered a medical condition—he suffers from sleep apnea, which stops his breathing during sleep—into the metaphysical. For Pradhan, “sleep does not always fall as a burden. It sometimes falls as a weight.”

The man who should rest his head on this pillow is struggling not to sleep; “he is resisting the fall and tries to stay awake, for there is so much to see, to learn, to do”. For Pradhan, sleep is also allegorical—he draws a parallel between his condition and his own demise, where death becomes an eternal sleep rehearsed each night.

The material choices carry the emotional argument. The handmade lokta leaves, individually painted, playful, and idealised, function as a visual language of longing, reaching toward something more breathable and alive. The real dried leaves undercut them immediately: withered, harsh, already given over to entropy. This contrast, between the idealised and the actual, between warmth and suffocation, charges the room with a tension that is difficult to name but impossible to ignore.

The installation was built to feel “inhabited, a room of an artist who feels like they haven't done enough, don’t have sufficient time.” Walking through it, one’s footsteps disturb the dried leaves, and the resulting sound is uncomfortably close to the sound of shallow breathing.

Tamang’s contribution approaches the same unease from the outside in. Her paintings and mixed-media works document the life of birds in an urban landscape: a lone sparrow perched on a crumbling brick wall, power lines cutting across a pale blue sky, timber splintered and repurposed as sculptural nests.

Where Pradhan’s installation collapses inward into the interior of a single sleepless body, Tamang’s work fans outward across the rooftops and ledges of a city that has quietly forgotten the creatures it displaced.

“In the city,” she says, “the bird, once a symbol of freedom, singing across open skies, is slowly losing its dwelling.” Her golden line, threaded through leaves and nest structures, is her most insistent gesture: a reminder that nature retains a value that urban density cannot fully erase. Tamang’s birds do not lament their condition; they rebuild inside it, and this quality of quiet persistence, of making a nest in an impossible place, resonates directly with Pradhan's figure in the bed.

The gallery is divided with an instinctive fairness: Tamang’s paintings occupy one half, Pradhan’s installation the other. Yet the title moves freely between both halves.

As Sophia L Pande, founder of Kala Salon, observes, “Going from one space to another, you can still feel the same title flowing through both their arts–you go from the installation of a bedroom that Momin has created to Sharmila’s work, which are essentially all manifestations of birds and nature and trees.”

That continuity is not accidental. The two artists spent their residency working in the same space, and the cross-pollination is legible. Three collaborative pieces appear in the show. “When you are working together in the same space,” Pande says, “You get influenced by each other. Artists can get stuck in their own world, so if they reach out and take in other people's ideas, it enriches their own.”

What makes ‘Chirping of Restless Heart’ more than the sum of its parts is the coherence of the shared proposition. The bird that cannot expand in the city and the artist who cannot breathe in sleep are, as both artists describe them, reflections of the same condition—both inhabiting environments that restrict their natural rhythm of breath and voice.

The exhibit neither dramatises this nor resolves it; it simply makes it visible with the measured attention of artists who have spent considerable time and energy inside these ideas. “These works are deeply personal,” Pande says, and that quality comes through in every material choice.

The show also marks Kala Salon’s three years. The gallery was established to support emerging artists across different art forms, including fine arts, installation, multimedia, mixed media, and other arts that remain underrepresented in Nepal’s more established exhibition venues.

“Once artists have an exhibition under their belts,” Pande explains, “They can build their CV and work towards another show, a solo show, maybe.” In a city where institutional support for experimental and multimedia work remains scarce, the gallery’s commitment to this kind of infrastructure is itself a form of quiet resistance.

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Chirping of Restless Heart

Where: The Kala Salon, Chhaya Center

When: Until May 2

Artists: Momin Pradhan and Sharmila Tamang

Time: 11 am to 8 pm

Entry: Free