Tenzing Dakpa, The Hotel

About

The compelling series of photographs features Dakpa’s family-run hotel in Sikkim, which is also his childhood home. Through the images, he creates a complex emotional and intellectual landscape which houses a series of ideas about family and home. Dakpa explores ideas of creating and returning home while simultaneously examining, collecting and coalescing his family’s experiences as inhabitants of this hotel. The photographs seem to capture a sense of belonging which at times is interlaced with feelings of disjuncture.

Tenzing Dakpa (b. 1985) lives and works between Goa and New Delhi. He is a 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. His work is 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, Dakpa 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. It is due to be published by Steidl in 2019. Dakpa’s works have been exhibited at various art galleries and institutions including: 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.