Sagarmatha Next presents: At the Tipping Point: Art and Ecology from the Rooftop of the World
Sponsored by Saraf Foundation and curated by Dr Arshiya Lokhandwala featuring 12 artists from all over the world, the exhibition will open on June 5 at 4 pm!
Framed by the towering Himalayas, this ecological exhibition underscores Nepal’s position as a “ground zero” for climate change. The urgency of the crisis is palpable—melting glaciers threaten global water supplies, erratic weather endangers agriculture, deforestation ravages biodiversity, and rising sea levels imperil coastal life. The extinction of species has upset the delicate balance of oceans, forests, and land, pushing ecosystems to the brink. Through thought-provoking artworks, the exhibition urges collective reflection on the shared consequences of human actions and the urgent need for sustainable stewardship to safeguard our planet.
Curator’s Note by Dr. Arshiya Lokhandwala
The opening of the exhibition happened on June 5, 2025 in Kathmandu, Nepal with a performance by Salil Subedi.
At the Tipping Point: Art and Ecology from the Rooftop of the World stages a critical artistic intervention into the accelerating crises of the Anthropocene. Set in the Himalayan foothills of the Kathmandu Valley, the exhibition is located at one of the most climatically vulnerable—and symbolically resonant—sites on Earth. With global temperatures already surpassing 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels, the world is approaching thresholds that scientists warn may trigger irreversible climate feedback loops. The Himalayas, which are warming at nearly double the global average, are among the most visible and volatile indicators of this planetary emergency.
Here, the effects of climate change are neither speculative nor future-bound. The Himalayas have lost over 40% of their glaciers in just the past few decades, with an estimated two-thirds projected to vanish by the end of the century if emissions continue unchecked. This glacial retreat directly threatens the freshwater sources of nearly two billion people across Asia, whose lives depend on the major rivers fed by Himalayan snowmelt. These mountains act as a climatic barometer—registering the pressures of a rapidly warming planet with stark, irreversible precision.
The exhibition activates this high-altitude vantage not to center Nepal as a subject, but to amplify its strategic location as a lens for planetary perception. Nepal’s proximity to Mount Everest—the highest point on Earth—offers a symbolic and material vantage. From this “rooftop of the world,” At the Tipping Point calls for a fundamental rethinking of the ecological imagination—where the local and the global, the visible and the invisible, the scientific and the spiritual converge. It leverages the symbolic resonance of Everest and the ecological precarity of the Himalayas to compel attention, awareness, and accountability. Everest functions as a planetary sensor, registering the impact of rising global temperatures with alarming clarity. From this elevated position, the exhibition launches a call to collective attention—using art to activate new forms of ecological perception, awareness, and response.
However, the curatorial framework does not isolate climate change as a discrete issue; instead, it maps a dense web of interconnected crises: rising temperatures, biodiversity collapse, deforestation, water scarcity, soil degradation, plastic inundation, and the erasure of indigenous ecological knowledge. These are not isolated phenomena but what Jason W. Moore describes as symptoms of the “Capitalocene”—a planetary condition driven by extractivist economies and colonial histories of resource domination[1]. Instead, the curatorial emphasis borrows heavily from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of “planetarity” as a critical framework that shifts the focus from “planet,” “earth,” and “globalization,” suggesting that these terms often refer to a unified natural space rather than a politically differentiated understanding of our connection to the Earth. Planetarity, in Spivak’s view, is a way of thinking about our relationship to the Earth that acknowledges its difference and our responsibility to it, moving beyond the limitations of capitalist globalization[2]. She argues that the planet embodies a “sense of alterity, “meaning it exists beyond our complete understanding or control. By this suggestion, thinking of ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents allow for a more profound engagement with the concept of alterity, which includes various forms of existence and knowledge that are not derived from human experience. Hence the exhibition At the Tipping Point borrowing Spivak’s theorization of “planetarity” invites a rethinking of our relationship with the planet, urging a move away from simplistic, anthropocentric views towards a more complex understanding of our place within a larger, interconnected system.
Each work in the exhibition functions as a node within a larger ecology of meaning and response. Whether through site-responsive installations, low-impact materials, with minimal carbon footprint, it performs an ecological ethic in both concept and form. It performs what theorist Andreas Boetzkes calls an “ethical ecology”[3]—where artistic form aligns with ecological consciousness, as a provocation: to listen differently, to see systemically, and to imagine otherwise asserting the critical role of art in cultivating planetary awareness and fostering modes of what Arturo Escobar calls “designs for the pluriverse”[4] alternative world-making practices grounded in relationality, reciprocity, and sustainability. Therefore, At the Tipping Point insists on the criticality of art as a medium for environmental thinking, insisting on the possibility of reworlding: of imagining new alignments between species, environments, and futures, as it strongly urges collective reflection on the shared consequences of human actions and the urgent need for sustainable stewardship to safeguard our planet.
