Across South Asia, tikās (tattoos) are traditionally marked in open spaces. Whether made in gardens or beneath a tree, the image markings encapsulate a form of embodied intelligence passed from person to person, from generation to generation. Initiated by the Nepalese artist collective ArTree, the project Tikā Chedna Angana takes its name from the Tharu language and loosely translates as “a garden of body markings.” This practice potently combines research, artistic methodology, and cultural resurgence through intergenerational collaboration with tikinyas—female practitioners of the tattooing art. For ArTree, the phrase opens a space in which to undertake a series of interventions focused around Indigeneity, encoding and marking practices, ancestral knowledge, territorial rights, and sisterhood. 

The title Tikā Chedna Angana was first introduced to the group by artist, poet, and activist Indu Tharu as a means of framing the spaces where tattooing has historically been performed and, in effect, passed down. The concept alludes to a site of knowledge production beyond institutionalized venues, arguing that one’s garden functions as an important site for artistic lineages for Indigenous peoples. The practice of body markings in South Asia also serves as a pathway for exploring matrilinearity, knowledge systems, and health technologies. Central to the collective’s work has been interconnecting Indigenous practitioners and communities across the borders of India and Nepal. 

The work of ArTree Nepal commenced in 2013 as a collectively-based artist nucleus that champions artistic practice and activism as inseparable praxis. ArTree Nepal includes artists, researchers and activists anchored in multiple Indigenous communities including Subas Tamang, Mekh Limbu, Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Hit Man Gurung, and Lavkant Chaudhary. For their project concerning tikās, they are joined by independent artists and researchers, including Indu Tharu, Urmila Gamwa Tharu, and Priyankar Chand, with additional support from the arts space Kalā Kulo.

For ArTree, Tikā Chedna Angana culminates years of relational developments that began with multiple entry points. For several artists in the collective whose grandmothers bore tikās, their conversations with each other and within their communities and families have unpacked how to engage with these marking practices intergenerationally. Another entry point has been interviews with individuals living with sickle cell disease, a primary symptom of which is pain that can occur unpredictably in the body, at any location, and with varying intensity. Tikās, also known as godnas, were made to relieve pain as part of a broader cosmogeny of transcendental body markings that forge relational ties and are believed to accompany the soul after death. Such markings exist across vast geographies, at times connecting Indigenous communities that are often exoticized for their isolation while subverting such a colonial gaze. 

Visually, tikās often appear as abstracted geometric forms with broad black markings that inscribe symbolic references, such as rice grains, a stove, a peacock, etc. They require meticulous attention to design and may take a few hours to several days to complete. A sketch is drawn onto the skin using a stick or metal rod. Needles or thorns tightly bound with string are used to repeatedly perforate the drawing, staining it with the distinctive black kajra ink. As an art form and visual language, tikās are under threat due to the persecution and economic and demographic pressures tikā bearers face. In their work, ArTree experiments in the resurgence of suppressed forms of artistic techné, both as a creative influence for artists of the group and as a mode of formal recognition of established women practitioners. With Tikā Chedna Angana, ArTree has brought together over a dozen Indigenous Tharu tikinyas from different villages along the Nepal-India border, a first in several decades. 

The modes of intelligence or intellectual property encoded through tikās stand at the interface of multiple regimes of health and medical technology. The relationship between tikā and healing has been little explored, yet etymologically, there is an indisputable link; the word for vaccine in much of India is tika. Vaccination and tattooing share similar processes of making, each involving piercing the skin with needles. Historically, malaria acted as a deterrent for hill-dwelling Nepalis to settle in the Tarai—the country’s southern plains—where Indigenous Tharu people, the original inhabitants of this area, demonstrated greater resistance to the disease. In the 1950s, funding from the United States poured in for malaria control, transforming the Tarai landscape and triggering significant social and demographic changes. Scholars studying Nepal concur that the reduction of malaria risk played a substantial role in enabling hill-based Nepalis to migrate to the Tarai, leading to illicit and forcible land acquisition and environmental degradation. This process, many argue, has contributed to the economic and political marginalization of Indigenous peoples in southern Nepal.¹

In the present day, the ArTree members seek to renegotiate this historically asymmetrical matrix of international connection through the self-determined sphere of art, championing tikā practice as social, ecological, and community health renewal in meaningful cultural exchange. Above all, methodological frameworks of autonomy drive their creative approach. They emphasize cultural commemoration and living practice rather than perpetuating extractive academic or colonial frameworks. In ArTree’s work, knowledge is encoded as praxis—with exchange through shared practice, communal gathering, and celebration marking the legacy of matrilineal heritage.

—

Vivian Ziherl is a critic, curator, and researcher of contemporary art, raised on Turrbal and Jagera country and currently based in The Netherlands as Director of Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art in Middelburg. Previously, Ziherl was Research and Programs Manager at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2019–26); founder and director of Frontier Imaginaries (2016–19); and Curator, If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution (2012–14). As a freelance curator Ziherl co-initiated Koloa: Women Art and Technology with Tunakaimanu Fielakepa and Cosmin Costinas (2019–21), co-convened Landings (2013-2014) with Natasha Ginwala, and co-curated the inaugural performance programs of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam Stage It! together with Hendrik Folkerts (2011–12).