In Person: Subash Thebe Limbu on Adivasi Futurism
In response to the approaching bicentennial of photography, the international symposium Image Worlds—supported by PhotoSouthAsia and co-presented by the Alkazi Foundation, Offset Projects and Maze Collective—was held at the India International Centre in New Delhi on 25 and 26 July 2025. Here, as part of a panel titled “Sightlines: Locating Ourselves in the 21st Century,” Subash Thebe Limbu spoke of Adivasi Futurism and its political urgency within contemporary image-making. Working across film, sound and installation, Limbu situates futurity within Indigenous experience, refusing its separation from land, language and ongoing violence. In this edited conversation, Limbu traces the origins of Adivasi Futurism; in 2015, while working with the writings of Octavia Butler—recording Butler’s texts and embedding them within a mixed-media installation using sound, Arduino systems and sensors—he encountered a framework that resonated with Afrofuturism, yet demanded grounding in the specific histories and geographies of Adivasi communities in South Asia.
The term “Adivasi Futurism,” Limbu explains, is not intended to distinguish itself from Indigenous Futurism or Afrofuturism, but to insist on presence. As someone from eastern Nepal’s Limbu (Yakthung) Nation, Limbu addresses the present-day violence of development on sacred indigenous land. For Limbu, the word “Adivasi” carries geographical location, cultural memory and political identity, situating futurism within lived realities shaped by ongoing extraction, dispossession and the modern nation-state. In his visual work then, symbols function as acts of honouring rather than allegory. A recurring motif is the silam sakma, a ritual object used for protection, meaning “to block the path of death.” Reimagined as a colossal mothership traversing time and space, it carries ancestral knowledge into speculative futures.
Subash Thebe Limbu is a Yakthung (Limbu) artist from Yakthung Nation (Limbuwan) in eastern Nepal. His Yakthung name is Tangsang (Sky). Encompassing sound, film, music, performance, painting and podcasts, his practice probes sociopolitical issues, resistance and science/speculative fiction. Notions of time, climate change and Indigeneity—or ‘Adivasi Futurism’—are recurring themes in his work. His recent exhibitions include Ancestral Knowledges, My Grandmother is My School, Tate Modern (2025); Avant-Garde Now: Time Travellers, M+ Hong Kong (2025); Sharjah Biennial (2025); Lahore Biennale (2024); Kathmandu Triennale 2077 (2022); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2021–22); and Dhaka Art Summit (2020). Limbu is the co-founding member of Yakthung Cho (Yakthung Art Society), and currently based in Kathmandu, Newa-Tamsaling and the United Kingdom.
(Featured Image: Video still from Ningwasum [2021] by Subash Thebe Limbu. Single channel video. Image courtesy of the artist.)
Recorded on 26 July 2025.
To learn more about Subash Thebe Limbu’s practice, watch a two-part conversation with the artist.
To learn more about the Image Worlds symposium, watch previous episodes of In Person featuring Yazid Anani as he discusses colonial imagery in the context of Palestine, Nimaya Harris on working with the Minnette de Silva archive and Neelika Jayawardane speak about her critical writing practice.
