Born 1985, Kathmandu, Nepal
Lives and works in Kathmandu and Mumbai, India

Karan Shrestha delves into the social and political structures of Nepal through an experimental mode of practice that combines video, drawing, photography and text. He gathers extensive amounts of his own footage, which he stitches together with documentary and found footage. The resultant videos layer aspects of history, scenes of violence, natural disaster, military mobilisation, mass gatherings and acts of waiting. Through these works, Shrestha investigates some of Nepal’s pressing humanitarian and environmental issues and their relationships with broader aspects of the nation’s historical and sociopolitical conditions.

Alongside videos, Shrestha creates detailed monochrome ink drawings that present a similar approach, with dense layers of disparate symbols and characters drawn from reality, mythology and imagination. In navigating the nuances between static and moving images as well as documentation and fiction, Shrestha’s works construct a dense vocabulary of Nepali narratives, peoples and histories.