Experimenter presents Weather Report, a solo project by Tenzing Dakpa, at Experimenter – Hindustan Road. The solo will showcase Dakpa’s recent body of photographic works Manifest and Weather Report. The images present a visceral imprint of his surroundings, where the human impact on the ecological world and the subjective gaze of the artist are intertwined.
In Manifest, Dakpa depicts the aftermath of forest fires in North Goa, which is speculated to be a result of man-made interventions into agricultural lands and forests subsumed into residential projects. In this body of photographs, made over the last three years after Dakpa relocated to Goa, he offers a lens into the tension between the human proclivity for rampant urbanisation and the irreversible decimation of the natural environment in the process. Abstract, yet tangible, he probes the residues of a charred landscape, half devoured by flames within interstices of light and darkness. This body of work presents his visual introspection into the phenomenon of land reclamation, the burning of forests and its renewal. Taken during the night, the photographs seem to be lulled into a dark inertia intermittently disrupted by the flashes of a strobe light. The trees, grass and soil that seem to have lost the materiality of life partially appear in the sombre topography, and the ink accumulates in spaces that are empty or give proof of the fire that devastated the landscape. By printing the images using pigment ink on acid-free paper, Dakpa manipulates the print by crumpling the paper, to evoke on the very surface, impressions of the terrains of the dead forests. Through this process, he conflates visuality and tactility, inextricably linked to each other, much like the notion of interconnectedness wrought in the cycle of life and death.
Dakpa’s photographic process invokes the notion of ‘bardo’ which according to Tibetan Buddhist philosophy refers to the intermediate passage where the consciousness of the deceased is guided between the end of one life and onto the beginning of the next. While the practice of photography holds within itself a memorialising quality through which it conjures a lost past, the process of reading a photographic image simultaneously confers an external value beyond its immediate context, which then assumes a life of its own. Similarly, in Manifest, he brings to light a transcendental liminal space, a terrain that can be detached from its origin, while fostering signs of life and regeneration through the act of photographing a singed landscape.
In the three photographic installations that are part of the Weather Report series, Dakpa documents the vagaries of the natural environment induced by the succession of seasons, climate, and the specific hour of the day. Having photographed over an extended period of time across varied locations, the installations presented in the exhibition are life-size composite of overlapping smaller prints which, once installed, appear to be breathing momentarily, as if animated with the impulse of life.
In Dakpa’s practice, one finds an evocative spin on the spaces that he inhabits and observes. Weather Report presents an intriguing play with texture, animated with the layered manoeuvres of his process. The exhibition foregrounds a distinct shift in Dakpa’s practice where his self-reflexive perspective creates images that are resonant with the temperament of a particular location and in conversation with formal aspects of the medium.
Tenzing Dakpa (b. 1985; lives and works between Sikkim, New Delhi and Goa) is a graduate of College of Art, University of Delhi (BFA, 2009) and Rhode Island School of Design (MFA Photography, 2016). Dakpa’s works have been exhibited at various art galleries and institutions including: Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022-23; Singapore International Photo Festival, Singapore, 2020; Indigo+Madder, London, 2019; Peckham 24, London, 2019; Asia House, London, 2018; FotoFest Houston Biennial, Texas, 2018; Clamp Art Gallery, New York City in 2016; Lamar Dodd School of Art, Georgia, 2016; Sol Koffler Gallery, Rhode Island, 2015.