The Hotel infers an in-between place of stay during transit. For me the title also implies a significance: of the relational, the historical and, concerned with identity—a place of retrieval. The sustenance of such significance, however is only made possible through a physical engagement where our collective experiences can play out. This sustenance is what motivates The Hotel as a site of photographic exploration.
The premise of the photographs revolves around my family-run hotel business which is also my home in Gangtok, Sikkim. Coming from my own dislocation introduced by migration for an arts education and opportunity, the disjuncture I’ve increasingly felt over 12 years towards my home is invoked in the series. The photograph’s articulate a prolonged engagement with personal identity, displacement and significance of site manifested through relationships as a son and an artist.
In The Hotel my father, mother and my older brother are seen working together through their daily gestures of upkeep for the hotel, eventually enjoying a meal together, only to return to their daily labor. In relation to my family’s own history of migration caused by the annexation of Tibet and ensuing political friction, I see the labor of my family in the hotel brushing up against an idea of survival where in repetition comes a ritual disjointed from introspection of history.
The photographs in The Hotel speak to a state of return from outside to subjects who live within – to accumulate meaning through layers and associations, experience how they nourish a space to make it an abode, to examine, gather, connect and coalesce a flux of temporal existence.
The Hotel
Tenzing Dakpa
Self-published
2018
94 pages
30.48 x 19.05 x 1.5 cm
Edition of 5