Hitesh Vaidya
Recollecting Memories
In the process of creating this deeply personal body of work, titled Recollecting Memories, artist Hitesh Vaidya repeatedly visited the site of his ancestral home that was destroyed during the devastating earthquakes in Nepal in 2015. Through meticulous paintings on salvaged debris, artefacts, and memories, Vaidya navigates the trauma of being uprooted and re-examines his relationship to a fractured past. This aspect of this installation includes various materials from the artist’s former home, including wooden beams and pillars, door and window panels, stone, and floor and roof tiles.Revisiting, repurposing, and archiving each object, he narrates a fragile, intergenerational history of quotidian rituals.
In the video portion of this installation work, Vaidya outlines a haunting evocation of his family’s house in the void of what remains. With care, he attempts to revive a broken space and rhythm that structured his life. For him, this practice was itself a medium to heal and cope with the trauma of loss and impermanence following the 2015 earthquakes; a seismic catastrophe now considered a turning point for present-day Nepali society. The video included in the installation is a short animation of drawing tracing the façade of his family’s collapsed house on a black and white still image of the now empty plot of land.
Centering the humble residences of Nepal, Hitesh Vaidya’s practice explores how domestic objects and architectural spaces are signifiers of a community’s shared memory and its ancestry. His hyperrealist paintings on unconventional surfaces initiate a dialogue between people’s daily habits and the materiality of religious offerings in Nepali homes. This crossover embodies the hybridization of belief systems in Nepal (Hinduism, Buddhism, Animism, amongst other Indigenous spiritual cosmological matrices). Vaidya’s artistic vocabulary expands the concepts of archaeology and heritage in the context of Nepal, where cultural heritage is heavily part of its nation-building, often instrumentalized in internal politics, romanticized and, at times, eroticized by foreign perspectives. For the artist, ubiquitous objects and the ways they are arranged inside people’s private spaces, along with their simplicity and assuming beauty, are equally transcendental as a holy religious site. Vaidya is also a founding member of Aakrit collective, based in Bhaktapur.