For Hitesh Vaidya, the city is both memory and wound. Growing up in Bhaktapur, Nepal, he witnessed how urbanization and time leave traces not only on architecture but also on the people who inhabit it. His practice navigates this fragile tension between personal memory, collective history, and rapid transformation. Through series such as Recollecting Memories, Hitesh paints and assembles salvaged debris, bricks, and wooden fragments from his ancestral home destroyed in the 2015 Nepal earthquake. These works are not reconstructions but acts of healing and remembrance, reviving spaces that once held rhythm and life.
In later projects like Changing Landscapes and Narrating the City, he relilmaps Bhaktapur's shifting environment. By painting on reclaimed agrath wooden panels once part of the city's living architecture, and drawing from Paubha traditions of the Newar community, he documents the contrast between nostalgia and urban intrusion. His works become a painterly archive of memory, loss, and survival, where personal histories merge with collective transformations.
Within the framework of the "empty box," Hitesh transforms ruins into language. Each brick, each surface, becomes a witness to absence, to continuity, to resilience. His art is a reminder that memory doesn't vanish with destruction; it survives in future.
