Welcome to Hotel Thai

Tripty Tamang Pahkrin

December 6, 2024 - February 1, 2025

In the exhibition, Welcome to Hotel Thai, artist Tripty Tamang Pakhrin explores her experience growing up in a restaurant and lodge in Kakarvitta, Nepal, which is situated along the open border with India. Pakhrin’s three parents – her birth mother, her father, and her father’s first wife - jointly run the business, where the duality of her family structure is mirrored in the hotel itself. Hotel Thai is the artist’s family home that also functions as a public space where there is a convergence of family and business, private and public, permanent and transient. The hotel is a place where the boundaries between personal and professional, intimate and commercial, shift daily. Customers come and go, mostly unaware of the family living together under one roof.

Growing up on a border, both literal and metaphorical, shaped Pakhrin’s understanding of home and relationships, and the lens through which she views the world. The domestic spaces within Hotel Thai reflect the geographic landscape outside – boundaries blurred, crossed, and redefined constantly. Meals are prepared in the kitchen for family and a stream of strangers. Guests arrive, stay, and leave, but their presence lingers in the rooms. Within these spaces, Pakhrin’s two mothers live and work silently side-by-side having set up invisible boundaries between themselves. This silence is a carefully constructed boundary, one that protects as much as it isolates. The mothers’ relationship is interdependent, as they work together at Hotel Thai daily, yet they remain distant in their personal relationship, managing to carve out separate lives even within the constrained space they share.

In this dynamic environment, Hotel Thai becomes a place of convergence and separation where public and private worlds coexist, and where Pakhrin’s two mothers physically and emotionally labor to keep the business and family running. The blending of worlds, the hotel as both home and workplace, has influenced the artist’s view of space, privacy, and identity, nuanced themes that she explores in this series of work.

Tripty Tamang Pakhrin (b. 1995, Nepal) lives and works in Syracuse, NY, where she is pursuing a MFA in art photography at Syracuse University.