On October 3, turbulent waters of the GLOF (Glacier Lake Outburst Flood) from the South Lhonak glacier, located at 17,300 feet above mean sea level, crashed into the already brimming reservoir of the 1200 MW Sikkim Urja Dam in Chungthang, North Sikkim. The dam was quickly overwhelmed and burst, releasing a wall of water 10-15 feet high. This deluge surged over the Teesta valley, devastating everything along its 162-kilometer path from the glacier to NHPC Teesta Low Dam Project (TLDP) III at 27th Mile in Kalimpong district.
The catastrophic floods downstream claimed several lives and left hundreds of homes, important roadways, and settlements destroyed, disrupting the lives of thousands of people who live along the Teesta River.The photo exhibition documents the disaster event which has left a lasting scar on the landscape and communities who faced the brunt of the disaster.
Aman Pradhan is a charcoal artist whose work delves into emotion and spirituality. Through the simplicity and rawness of black and white, he explores the unseen—capturing moments of stillness, struggle, healing, and introspection. His pieces are designed to encourage viewers to look beyond the surface and connect with their inner selves on a deeper, spiritual level. His artwork is showcased @_esthetic_charcoal.
Aman’s artwork will be available for sale during the conclave.
Shivam Darnal is an educator and photographer based in Darjeeling, India. With over a decade of experience in education, he integrates storytelling and visual literacy into classroom learning and community-based workshops. His practice engages with photography, oral histories, and interdisciplinary art forms rooted in the Eastern Himalayas.
He has facilitated and participated in several photography workshops, including Photo Kathmandu, Angkor Photo Festival, and The Confluence Collective. His work has been exhibited at Serendipity Arts Festival, Egaro Photo Festival, and the Angkor Photo Festival, among others. Recent projects include In Her Footsteps: Women’s Oral Archive in Eastern Himalayas (2023) and Home (2025).
Suveksha Pradhan is an artist from Sikkim. She works as a full-time artist, painting commissions, murals, and other things. Suveksha believes that art should be a part of everyone’s life and that it should be inculcated and nurtured in children from the region. She has participated in five national and one international exhibitions till date.
Nirvan Pradhan is from Rimbick, Darjeeling and currently works as an Assistant Professor at Narasinha Dutt College, University of Calcutta.
His photo exhibition illuminates how economic expansion devours untouched lands, transforms them into hubs of extraction, and discards them as depleted ruins once their value is exhausted. The exhibition turns its lens to the abandoned tea estates of Darjeeling, where colonial-era investments once sculpted rolling hills into vast plantations. Today, these once-thriving sites stand as “capitalist ruins” (Tsing 2015), their infrastructures crumbling under neglect and disinvestment. Managers have fled, devaluing the land and stranding workers amid decaying relics that whisper of past exploitation and fragile futures. This visual narrative probes the afterlife of abandonment, revealing how capitalist frontiers’ collapse reshapes communities and environments, while inviting reflection on salvage, survival, and the seeds of renewal in the shadows of empire.
