ARTICLE
Kunga Tashi Lepcha b. 1988
A contemporary Indian photographer from Gangtok, Sikkim, Kunga Tashi Lepcha has worked to document the effects of environmental disruption and sociopolitical changes on vulnerable communities in Northeast India. He is also a co-founder of the public history initiative The Confluence Collective.
Kunga’s documentary work has explored the social and ecological impacts of infrastructure projects, specifically hydroelectric dams along the Teesta River in Sikkim, home to the Lepcha people. These photographs have appeared in the essay anthology The Birds Have Lost Their Way (2018) and Kunga’s series Children of the Snowy Peak (2020–). His series Home by the River (2018) documents community life in the flood-prone river island Majuli in Assam. His collaboration with historian and researcher Anand Damodaran on Project Frontier Pass (2017–19) explored the lives and cultures of people living along India’s politically fraught Himalayan border with Myanmar.
Kunga’s series Days of Summer (2019–), focusing on a small skateboarding community in Gangtok, documents forms of solidarity in the city’s youth culture in the face of challenges such as alienation and drug abuse. In 2020, Kunga co-founded The Confluence Collective — a community platform for archiving and engaging with the ancestral histories of the Sikkim–Darjeeling Hills region — with Mridu Rai, Dipti Tamang, Ashwin Sharma, Shivam Darnal and Praveen Chettri. Kunga has also participated in digitising documents and images from the Sikkim Palace Archives as part of Project Denjong; and photographed craftspeople and craft traditions in Sikkim and Uttarakhand for the design collective Echostream and the Uttarakhand government.
Kunga received the first Amiyaprabha Chaudhuri Memorial Grant from Egaro Photo Festival in 2019 for Days of Summer, and The Himalayan Fellowship for Creative Practitioners (THF) from Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) in 2023. His work has been shown at events such as the Sangai Photo Festival (2018), the Angkor Photo Festival (2018), Rencontres d’Arles (2022), and India Art Fair (2024). At the time of writing, he lives and works in Gangtok.
Bibliography
“2873: Woman Collecting Water, Walking Over a Mass of Geotextile Bags Flood Barrier on the Banks of the Brahmaputra River.” Climate Visuals, February 2, 2019. Accessed June 12, 2024. https://climatevisuals.org/asset/2873/.
Eden, Tshering, and Pema Wangchuk (eds.). The Birds Have Lost Their Way. Gangtok: Lokta Books, 2018.
Egaro Photo Festival. “Grant.” Accessed June 12, 2024. https://www.egarophotofestival.com/grant.
Foundation for Contemporary Indian Art. “The Himalayan Fellowship for Creative Practitioners.” Accessed June 12, 2024. https://ficart.org/thf-recipients-2023.
Ghosh, Ankita. “Collective Medias, Narrative Futures: Reading the Egaro Photo Festival.” ASAP, April 6, 2024. Accessed June 11, 2024. https://asapconnect.in/post/703/singlestories/collective-medias-narrative-futures.
Lepcha, Kunga Tashi. “Room and Board: Inside Gangtok’s Skateboarding Subculture.” The Caravan, January 1, 2023. Accessed June 11, 2024. https://caravanmagazine.in/communities/inside-gangtok-skateboarding-subculture.
Rai, Parva. “Echostream: A Collective of Designers and Dreamers.” Sikkim Project, January 7, 2022. Accessed June 12, 2024. https://www.sikkimproject.org/echostream-a-collective-of-designers-and-dreamers/.
Rai, Parva. “Introduction: Sikkim; The Reinvention of Identities and Cultures.” Marg 65, no. 4 (2016): 14–23.
Solanki, Veeranganakumari. “Building an Archive: The Confluence Collective on Retelling Histories.” ASAP, January 14, 2023. Accessed June 11, 2024. https://asapconnect.in/post/519/singlestories/building-an-archive.
