The Himalayas are to Asia what the spine is to the human body.
And Ladakh and Zanskar have become my non-negotiable vertebrae.
In these territories, even though villages lie kilometres apart, life moves naturally between them. Gestures, encounters, and daily practices always point to something shared. That continuity asserts itself even before the landscape does.
This is why the images do not appear in isolation. They brush against one another, connect, observe, and complete each other. One horizon flows into the next, one gaze responds to the previous one, because every fragment needs the presence of others to fully unfold. Just like in the spine: if one vertebra shifts, the whole body feels it, because nothing advances alone.
The line running through the exhibition space barely suggests a direction. It does not divide or fragment; it simply reminds us that the fabric of this fascinating society, settled up there in the highest reaches of the Earth, belongs to a single body, even as attitude, distance, or emotion shift.
Here, cohesion does not depend on grand gestures, but on habits that have been at work for centuries and filter into the ways of speaking, waiting, resolving, and being. They are discreet, yet effective. And as long as they endure, their idiosyncrasy will continue to live and flourish at its own pace.
Thank you for being with us on a day that brought so many layers of this project into dialogue.
And thanks to the lands and people of Ladakh and Zanskar for settling into my spine with the ease of things that aren’t planned, yet choose to stay.
PS: Soon the exhibition will move to a new location. Same same, but different.
