When he was around 10 years of age, Thoudam Victor would play football for hours with his friends in Imphal. A break between games meant running to the river, which flowed next to the playground, with his friends, drinking the sweet water and splashing some of it on his face. “I don’t know how many children can do that these days,” rues the 40-year-old. “I feel a powerful pull towards the rivers of my region even today.” It is because of this early engagement with nature that Victor, a graduate from the National School of Drama, constantly strives to talk about the North-East’s environmental fragility and political instability. Founder of the Manipur-based Akhoka Theatre, he has won accolades for his work at festivals such as the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards.
Victor’s reflections on the human relationship with nature were presented recently in his new play, The Will from the Unspoken Bank, which was staged on 9 December at the Travancore Palace, Delhi, as part of the exhibition ‘These Liquid Lines: Exercises in Memory, Attunement and Movement’. This was presented by the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) and Royal Enfield’s annual multidisciplinary festival, Journeying Across the Himalayas, dedicated to dialogue between creative arts about the Himalayan region. Victor, along with nine other practitioners from various artistic disciplines, were the recipients of the Himalayan Fellowship for Creative Practitioners 2025 by FICA.
The Will from the Unspoken Bank, an hourlong non-verbal play came about as a result of repeated conversations with residents in and around the villages of Imphal about the deforestation of catchment areas. “I’m trying to make the invisible visible, stressing that development cannot be done aggressively,” he says.
According to Vidya Shivadas, director, FICA, the power of shared experiences offers hope, resilience, and a collective voice that needs to be heard, felt, and understood by the audience. While the first edition of the exhibition held in December 2024also focused on issues of the region, the second edition unfurled an even deeper layer of conversations and engagements. “Just to have this breadth of practitioners from across the Himalayan region is a remarkable opportunity to bring forth voices of people, many of whom are continuing to live in ecologically fragile zones,” says Shivadas. Every fellow in this year’s edition could be seen unfolding his or her personal journey, making connections with the ecology, culture, and the history of various places in the region. All of these strands were knit together and presented before the audience.
For 26-year-old Arieno Kera, who studied in Delhi and Santiniketan after leaving Kohima, getting selected as one of the 10 FICA fellows allowed her to question her own journey as an outsider looking in towards her roots. Coming from the Anghami tribe, part of a larger community called Tenyimia, Kera’s work, In the Beginning there was Departure, is intense in its detailed drawing and materiality, inspired by the folktales of the village Makhel, a Naga ancestral site of origin and departure. The work is an ongoing engagement with her inner self to answer the pressing question—“Where does one truly belong?” “Departure is not a line with a start and finish point. It’s a circle,” says Kera, who is now based in Kohima. This has taken on an even more philosophical touch after the death of her grandmother recently. “When you are away from home, you start wondering about your roots even more from an outsider’s perspective,” she adds.
Each of the ten participating artists in the exhibition carried forth this enquiry into issues pertinent to the Himalayan region. Assam-based filmmaker Sagar Saurabh’s The Visitors, for instance, explored the relationship between a 65-year-old retired school teacher and hornbills. At the same time, Kesang Thakur’s Home is a Circle, brings together folktales, music, poetry and stories of the region in a film, which is still being developed. Ladakh-based visual artist Tsetan Angmo’s Chu Chumik Changti, an animated film, looks at oral histories told from the perspective of an 85-year-old monk. It particularly focuses on the Shawa Chumik, a natural spring water body with healing powers, and how it’s under stress due to ecological imbalance and global warming.
Researcher and heritage conservationist Wasim Ashoor, who established the Balti Museum to safeguard the heritage of Nubra Valley’s lesser-known Balti community, put together a compendium of material to showcase the communal and collective practices of the people. Kashmir-based visual artist Zainab brought to the fore her personal account of growing up in a region under military occupation. The resulting images are “markers of resistance”. As the founding member of Her Pixel Story, a Kashmir-based women’s photographers’ collective, Zainab’s work in the current exhibition combined the banality and horror of violence with the people directly affected by it. Another perspective on Kashmir was brought forth by Zeeshan Nabi through soundscapes and photographs. The artist has trained in both western and Indian music, and specialises in experimental music and sound art. For the FICA exhibition, Nabi recorded sounds from Maisuma, Zero Bridge, and Foreshore in Kashmir. These were then arranged in a manner as to evoke a sense of fragility and disquiet among the listeners.
The soundscape seems to have emerged as a popular mode of expression among artists of late. In this exhibition too one could see different forms of this genre. Lalsangzuala Tetea Vanchhhawng spotlighted the folk instruments of Mizoram through his work. Musician Veecheet Dhakal too created asoundscape combining drawings, stories, and songs by children from the Teesta Highway Region, focusing on the pressure on the Teesta River due to hydroelectric power dams. Dhakal’s work draws on the uncertainties young people in the region face, especially as they confront the pressures of hopelessness.
“Art is an important way to build conversations,” says Shivadas. This exhibition by the selected practitioners, all of whom are in the age group of 20-40, is grounded in enquiries, and the questions that the artists seek answers to. For Bidisha Dey, executive director, Eicher Group Foundation, These Liquid Lines brings us to a space where memory and landscape intersect. “These narratives align beautifully with the overall 2025-theme, ‘Ours to Tell’, at Journeying Across the Himalayas. The projects sit at the cusp of ecology, culture and identity — where every telling carries many tellers, and every path reveals both continuity and change,” she says.