Signals from Another Star

Dungjonma and the Inward House

A site-specific installation drawing on Dungjonma, a figure in Ladakhi folklore who is said to pull the central beam out of a house, leave a strand of her own hair in its place, and vanish. Angmo takes the house — not the figure — as the subject.

Look for Work built into the fabric of a house in the old town.

MANMO

Built around the manmo, a supernatural female presence in Ladakhi oral tradition. The work is sited in Kharyok, the old town's historic core, among the houses and streets those stories are attached to.

Look for The westernmost of the five Old Leh works.

Ways of Protection

An installation about protective symbols — the objects and marks people keep to feel safe — and how they are inherited and changed rather than fixed. Worked in light and colour.

Look for Best seen when the light is low; it is a work with a lit component.

Untitled

A site-specific work about the built surfaces of Old Leh themselves — weathered wall, mud plaster, aged stone, abandoned structure — read as a record of the people and building practices that made them rather than as decay.

Look for The work is the wall. Look at the cracks and repairs, not past them.

Za s Chu Thungse

Built on a Ladakhi childhood story: that a worn-out shoe thrown at the tail of a rainbow will burst it open and spill treasure. Namgial uses it to look at what we are taught to want.

Look for The southeastern corner of the Old Leh cluster.

Burrowed in Time

Marmots gathered around a water pond, made in reference to marmot burrows and hibernation — a cycle of waiting out the season underground. Water is the scarce thing here, and the work is built around it.

Look for Below the gompa, off the second gate from the main road.

KARSi / THRIIN

Not an object but an event: the annual karsi, the traditional lime-washing of Basgo Gompa, carried out by the artist together with the community and framed as a collective performance. Quicklime is slaked, steam rises, and the building is maintained the way it has always been maintained.

Look for This one only exists while it is happening. Turning up outside an activation time means seeing a whitewashed monastery, not the work.

Kaktse sNam

Broken pottery shards collected from sites across Ladakh, assembled into a surface laid over an abandoned ruin. Likir families were entrusted with producing pottery for the region under the Ladakhi kings; the shards are gathered from the routes that trade took.

Look for A ruin near the monastery, cloaked in fragments.

Vessel

Vessels made from locally sourced clay and left in the open to be changed by sun, wind and rain over the run of the Biennale. What you see depends on when in the ten days you come.

Look for About 300m east of Tundup Dorjay's work.

Remnants of Belonging

A sculptural installation built from stone and clay sourced on site, following the contours of the rock it sits in so that it reads as an extension of the formation rather than an object placed on it. Earth, stone and bone.

Look for Set into the mountainside — look up from the road rather than along it.

3000 Realms

The old wooden footbridge over the river, strung with bells and turned into an instrument. The river runs, the wind moves, and the bridge sounds as you cross it.

Look for The suspension footbridge over the Indus. You will hear it before you see it.

sā did not publish a coordinate for this work. The pin shown is the Nurla site anchor. The work is on the old wooden footbridge across the river in Nurla valley — head for the bridge, not the pin.

Transient Mountains

A photograph printed onto cloth and flown as a flag. The image is of an egg tray pressed into fresh snow during a 2022 residency, briefly making a shape like a mountain range; the snow melted, the photograph did not. Four years on it is back here as fabric in the wind.

Look for A flag. Skarma Sonam Tashi also has the Museum in Progress flag at this site.

Rising from the Soil, Soaring to the Sky

1,008 square feet of carpet design laid across the adjoining roofs of a house — the patterns of Himalayan woven rugs, made instead from strands of local soil. Walking on it is part of the work; the walking, the wind and any rain gradually return it to the ground.

Look for 1.2km west of the other two Lamayuru works — the furthest apart of any site's cluster. It is on roofs, so look up.

Ground Control

A loose grid of cross-shaped markers across the site, made to resemble survey targets — the visual language used to map a landscape before anything is taken out of it. Made from nomadic-sourced wool, marigold dye and local twigs; the yellow is the colour of the salt flats where lithium is looked for.

Look for A scattered field of yellow crosses. Nearest of the three to the Moonland viewpoint.

Traces of Flow

A field of synthetic colour set against white pebble lines that map where water still runs — a picture of warming and drying in a place that depends on glaciers. The colour is the absence.

Look for On the ground at the village entrance. White pebble lines are the other half of the work.

Blue Scaffolds in Zbayul

Construction scaffolding, painted blue, leaning and climbing through the valley around an abandoned aqueduct. Horizontal and vertical lines set at deliberately unstable angles across the terrain.

Look for Blue against grey rock — visible from some way off as you come through the gorge.

The Memory of Routes

Chali weaving patterns — the textiles that came out of Ladakh's climate, terrain and nomadic movement — rebuilt at architectural scale in black and white. The patterns are read here as records of trade routes.

Look for Can be viewed from NH1 without leaving the road. Black and white, large.

The Land is Alive

A geodesic dome built from plant-based bioplastics, its surface printed with ethno-medicinal plants used in Sowa-Rigpa, the Tibetan medical system. The plants are those of Sapi village in western Kargil, one of the richest concentrations of medicinal flora in Ladakh.

Look for A dome. About 300m north of Stanzin Samphel's work.

Invisible Threads

Embroidered, crocheted and knitted pieces made by local women artisans and laid across the collapsed sections of the old village's stone architecture. The work is the repair, and the repair was made by many hands.

Look for On the ruins of the old village, below the present one.