4th June 2020
6pm IST
The webinar will be held on the online platform Zoom. To join the webinar please click on the link below:

We will be in conversation with photographer Tenzing Dakpa on his first publication, The Hotel, working on the project independently and its impact while with a publisher (Steidl) for the same, the influence of his art education on photography and his approach towards personal work projects.

To order your copy of The Hotel you can write to the artist at : dakpa.tenzing@gmail.com

About The Hotel

The hotel in this book is both real and metaphorical, an actual establishment run by Tenzing Dakpa’s parents in Sikkim, Northeast India, and a prism through which he revisits his family history and place within it. Dakpa’s photos reveal the physical spaces of the hotel, its guest rooms, dining room, the family’s cat on a flight of stairs; as well as signs of daily working life there: sheets hanging out to dry, clipping plants in the garden, his parents engaged in various tasks. For the hotel is both public and private, a business and a home: a transient place for guests who come and go and a residence that holds the memories of its owners and projects their hopes.

As the only member of his family not involved in running the hotel, Dakpa’s photos allow him to negotiate his migration and detachment from it, while intensely exploring his family relationships. In Dakpa’s words, one’s sense of self is inseparable from the places we create, both physically and in our minds: “The nature of our official identity and place on paper is adopted and the one which is in our memory is fragmented, revealed only in places we once remember.” The Hotel is the winner of the Singapore International Photography Festival Photobook Award 2018.

About the artist

Tenzing Dakpa (b.1985) lives and works between Goa and New Delhi.
He is second-generation Tibetan and was born in Sikkim, India. Dakpa first moved to New Delhi to study graphic design at the College of Art, University of Delhi (BFA, 2009) and then to the United States, where he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (MFA Photography, 2016). He was the recipient of a RISD fellowship between 2014-2016 and the T.C. Colley Scholarship for Excellence in Photography in 2015. Dakpa’s book The Hotel was published by Steidl in April 2020.
Dakpa’s work is also included in the book Photography and Tibet by Clare Harris, which is the first historical survey of photography in Tibet and the Himalayas. In 2016, he was an artist in residence at the Center for Photography, Woodstock, NY. In 2018, The Hotel was shortlisted for the Mack First Book Award and won the Photobook Award at the Singapore International Photography Festival. Dakpa’s works have been exhibited at various art galleries and institutions including: The Hotel, indigo+madder, London 2019; Asia House, London in 2018; FotoFest Houston Biennial, Asia Society Texas Center (Texas) in 2018; Lamar Dodd School of Art, Athens, Georgia in 2016; Sol Koffler Gallery, Rhode Island in 2015; Woods Gerry Gallery (Rhode Island) in 2014; World Event Young Artists festival (Nottingham) and The Art Loft (Mumbai) in 2012.