artist statement

This body of work documents a pivotal moment in Nepal's contemporary history—the protests that erupted in Kathmandu on September 8-9, 2025—not as a detached observer, but as a witness to generational fracture made visible. Through three sequential acts, I trace the anatomy of civic rupture: the gathering storm of collective anger, the physical confrontation between state apparatus and citizen body, and the quiet aftermath where resolution remains suspended.

The title speaks to the central paradox I observed through my lens: young hands, digitally fluent and globally conscious, straining against institutional chains forged in different eras. These are not my grandparents' protests. The demonstrators I photographed carry smartphones alongside placards, their tactics informed by transnational movements yet rooted in distinctly Nepali grievances about governance, corruption, and the gap between democratic promise and lived reality.

conceptual framework

My approach rejects photojournalism's claim to objectivity. Instead, I position myself as embedded—a photographer whose own generation stands at this crossroads. The work interrogates what it means to document your peers demanding change in a nation still negotiating its post-monarchy identity, where democratic institutions barely span a generation but already show the calcification of entrenched power.

Act I: Assembly captures the pre-confrontation energy—faces illuminated by conviction, bodies forming collective geometry, the transformation of urban space into contested ground. Here, I focus on gesture and anticipation: hands raised not yet in defense but in declaration.

Act II: Collision documents the moment when protest becomes clash—the physicality of resistance meeting force, tear gas diffusing light into ethereal violence, bodies in motion between advance and retreat. These images deliberately blur the line between documentation and abstraction, suggesting how violence fragments both vision and certainty.

Act III: Aftermath sits in the uncomfortable quiet that follows: debris, emptied streets, residual graffiti as evidence. But also faces marked by exhaustion and uncertain victory, the question of what comes next hanging in dusty air. This section refuses clean resolution, mirroring the ongoing nature of civic struggle.