Artist Bivas Rai’s solo exhibition ‘Myth & Memory’ will open at Siddhartha Art Gallery, Baber Mahal Revisited, on August 28.

Presented by the Australian Himalayan Foundation (AHF) and Siddhartha Art Gallery, the exhibition brings together paintings that explore Kirati Rai culture through Sakela, a communal dance and festival celebrated to honour nature and ancestors.

Rai, recipient of the 2025 AHF Himalayan Art Award, grew up in an extended Rai family surrounded by stories. As a child, however, he says he rarely had the patience to listen to them. Years later, his relationship with those stories has changed.

“Indigenous history is primarily passed down in the form of stories from one generation to the next,” says Rai. His growing curiosity about the stories he once avoided led him to spend the past year observing, listening to, and archiving accounts shared by elders in his family.

Rather than trying to establish a single authoritative version, ‘Myth & Memory’ works within this shifting nature of folklore.

Sakela provides the visual language for the series. Its silli, or dance movements, often imitate elements of nature, including animals and flowers. While Sakela sets the visual tone, Rai says the exhibition is rooted in sisterhood and matriarchy.

Every painting in the series features one of his sisters. Rai connects the women he grew up with to the Kirati myth of Tayama and Khiyama, the primordial sisters, allowing familial memory and inherited mythology to occupy the same space.

“My world has been shaped entirely by the strength and presence of my mother, her sisters, and my own sisters,” says Rai.

Through ‘Myth & Memory’, these recollections are carried from oral storytelling into painting, preserving them while acknowledging that memory itself continues to shift each time a story is retold.

The exhibition will be inaugurated by Australian Ambassador to Nepal Simon Ernst, AHF Chair Garry Weare, and AHF Himalayan Art Award founder Margie Thomas.

Myth & Memory

When: August 28 to September 20
Where: Siddhartha Art Gallery, Baber Mahal Revisited, Kathmandu
Opening: August 28, 5:30 pm