The inaugural show at Arthshila's newly-opened space in Goa—A Desert Meets a Forest curated by Latika Gupta—joins the growing conversation around Himalayan culture that has emerged in recent years. Institutional support in the form of FICA’s Himalayan Fellowship and the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art and archival projects by the Confluence Collective and Nepal Picture Library have created spaces for nuanced discourse which sees the region as a whole—stretching Afghanistan in the northwest to Myanmar in the southeast—rather than split between national and state boundaries. Critically, such conversations highlight not only the long cultural history of the region but the more recent concerns around hypertourism, infrastructure, cultural conservation and emigration.

A Desert Meets a Forest carefully picks its way between the immensity and intimacy of tradition. Jigmet Angmo’s watercolours and sculptures of clay houses embedded in fist-sized crystals, condense the vast Ladakhi landscape while instinctively seeking out the human scale in homes nestled between boulders and small hills. The ethereal terrain evoked by the sculptures and occasional surrealist elements in the watercolours has the spark of local legends and folklore. A series of dyed swatches of wool, often appliquéd to paintings, immediately reference the many weaving traditions of the region and echo the landscapes in their graduated colour, fragile scale and snippet-like glimpses into other lives.

Ladakh’s rugged summer landscape returns in Skarma Sonam Tashi’s clay and cardboard papier-mache relief sculptures, a combination that offers a paradoxical yet fitting commentary on permanence. The built environment in these images appears inextricable from the natural terrain, hovering somewhere between rock outcrop and excavation site. Striking a dialogue with Angmo’s paintings on the opposite wall of the gallery, these works take the form of stelae recovered from a foreboding landscape with an inscrutable past.

Such suggestive and enigmatic iconography—historical or otherwise—occurs in several works in the show. Tundup Churpon’s Petroglyphs from Ladakh (2022), four small ceramic tablets each featuring pictographs and motifs derived from thangkas, apotropaic symbols and (as the title suggests) prehistoric rock art from Ladakh, along with more muted works like Earth Gradients from Ladakh (2024) propose visual dialects by which land is made legible. A similar approach, reflecting a historian’s focused curiosity guided by communal familiarity, can be seen in Stanzin Samphel’s Transformation of Thab (2024). Each of the five large stones in the series is engraved with an image of the thab, a traditional Ladakhi clay stove and itself an intricately decorated object. With their natural contours retained to resemble timeless sacred artefacts, the sculptures come together to form a mantra of the hearth and home. 

Picking up this thread are the intricately constructed totemic forms by Zahara Batool and Alyen Leeachum Foning. Batool’s hanging sculptures of tightly wound copper wire are perhaps too enigmatic, with no text to guide the unfamiliar viewer. The headdress worn by Foning in her performance piece Sky Dancer: The bridge where the skies meet the earth (2023) showcases her craftsmanship as a textile designer, with its careful, effective use of phago reep (Indian trumpet) seeds, fabric and cords. The six eyes at the centre, echoing the form of the sacred plant’s seeds around it, constantly pull you in, as does the hypnotic, meditative ancestral devotion evident in her performance.

As one moves from the first to third galleries, the tone of the works becomes more empirical and the variety of approaches to such work raises interesting questions about the responsibilities and liberties of an artist embedded in their subject. Somewhere on the cusp of folkloric suggestion and hard documentation is Ayan Biswas’ Changpe Nor Tang Gang-ge Rildog (2024). His prints use salt, local plants and tea, all critical to the history, culture and ecology of Ladakh’s Changthang plateau where the project took place. In experimenting with slower, often novel processes, Biswas searches for a degree of immersion into the land that is earned through an offering of patience and understanding.

Prasiit Sthapit and Shristi Shrestha’s installation Blessings of Apparitions Underground (2023) is a series of photographs with explanatory text on hitis, the historic stone water fountains of the Kathmandu Valley and the threats they face from administrative neglect and contemporary urbanisation. The work contextualises their research in a network of concerns around water security, public access to essential resources and sustainability. One is drawn in by the images of the wildlife that also make use of the hitis, such as snakes and frogs, as well as the fountains themselves, which are carved to resemble makaras, protective chimeric creatures in Himalayan art and the humanoid yaksha statues which guard the hitis' underground reservoir. Particularly touching and thoughtful is a large print depicting the many water collection objects which locals (mainly working-class women) use at the hiti, from recycled petrol cans and paint buckets to bottles and water drums. While comprehensive, one can’t help but feel that the format is a necessary compromise between the evocative potential of its subjects and the pragmatic requirements of the larger project.

The photographs in Gallery 3 are entirely documentary. Millo Ankha’s project Kormo Bekoduku (2020) is a close study of the ritualised agrarian practices of the Apatani community of Ziro Valley in Arunachal Pradesh. An Apatani woman herself, Ankha’s photographs show glimpses of the diligence with which the community maintains its traditional circular economy of forest management and agriculture, alongside more ordinary and intimate moments which drew the photographer’s eye. Images of urbanisation in Ziro Valley and flat, diagrammatic images of useful local plants appear as two different but related signs of encroachment on Indigenous life: one a negotiated integration with a dominant economy and culture and another an anxious attempt to salvage an oral archive of botanical knowledge before it disappears. The photographs in ArTree Nepal’s Tika Chhedna Angana (2024) are relatively straightforward, showing Tharu women in Nepal’s Tarai region preparing new tattoo designs, the ink and examples of finished tattoos. Other community activities that characterise such gatherings were presumably recorded in a video, which was unfortunately not playing during my visit.

Tsering Motup’s photographs of kitchens in contemporary Ladakhi homes are juxtaposed with his documentation of metalworkers in Chilling, Ladakh, whose wares have historically been made for domestic use. One is confronted with the degree to which traditional homes have been transformed by contemporary consumerist aspirations and aesthetics, as well as the material reality of the crafts which are, in different ways, supported and threatened by opposing spectrums of the modern market.

Despite a few minor stumbles in presentation, A Desert Meets a Forest puts together a comprehensive survey of approaches taken by artists in highlighting the what, why and how of the changing culture and ecology in the Himalayas. The exhibition avoids the pitfalls of simplistic nostalgia, condescending saviorism and disconnected conservatism with which cultural preservation is sometimes discussed and offers instead a vivid, moving sense of how closely a people can be connected to the land and the resilience which has preserved such relationships.