‘What Empire Took, What Empire Left: Museums, Borders and the Politics of Return in South Asia’, an exhibition about the effects in South Asia during Western Occupation, is opening at Taragaon Next, Boudha on August 23. The day will begin with a symposium, followed by the exhibit’s official opening.
Supported by the Saraf Foundation and curated by Arshiya Mansoor Lokhandwala, the exhibit brings together eleven artists from across South Asia and its diaspora to examine how the sacred deities, manuscripts, and ritual objects have been removed from living contexts and reclassified within Western museums. This exhibition confronts that rupture.
The exhibiting artists are Temsüyanger Longkumer, Reetu Sattar, Shaurya Kumar, Raqs Media Collective, Mithu Sen, Divya Mehra, Marium Ghani, LN Tallur, Roshan Mishra, Bishal Manandhar and Jagath Weerasinghe.
“As museums globally confront the colonial histories embedded within their collections, restitution has become one of the defining cultural questions of our time,” says Lokhandwala. “This exhibition brings South Asia into that urgent discourse, asking not simply what should return, but who holds the power to own, interpret and determine the afterlives of displaced heritage.”
‘What Empire Took, What Empire Left’ takes as its starting point a central provocation: what happens when the sacred is violently dislocated—not only from place, but from time, ritual, and meaning?
Spanning Nepal’s emptied temples, the dispersal of India’s bronzes, Gandharan sculpture from Pakistan, and the erosion of Bangladesh’s terracotta heritage, the exhibit traces a region-wide history of cultural dismemberment.
Through contemporary artistic practice, it builds a counter-archive that positions acts of return as a form of epistemic resistance.
21.12°C Kathmandu
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