Entangled Territories: Tibet Through Images—on now at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC (MOA) until March 29, 2026—reimagines Tibet by showing how it has been represented historically by outsiders, and how Tibetans themselves now present and talk about Tibet.
This special exhibition was curated by Dr. Fuyubi Nakamura, Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies and Curator, Asia at MOA.
It was developed in collaboration with the Lodoe Kunphel Tibetan Language School, BC at the Tsengdok Monastery in Vancouver, supported and operated by The Tibetan Cultural Society of British Columbia and Tibetan-Canadian artists.
Dr. Tsering Shakya was a collaborator for the exhibition and its accompanying publication, Entangled Territories: Tibet Through Images.
In this virtual conversation with Dr. Tsering Shakya and Dr. Fuyubi Nakamura, they discuss how Tibet has been represented, remembered, and reimagined through images, names, and narratives. Drawing from archives, art, and community collaboration, the dialogue examines the power of images and the role of museums in shaping historical memory.
Dr. Shakya is a widely published scholar on both historical and contemporary Tibet. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies and School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, and serves on the Steering Committee of the UBC Himalaya Program.
Dr. Nakamura is a socio-cultural anthropologist and curator of the exhibition. Since visiting Dharamsala in India in 1995 and Tibet and Nepal in the 2010s, the Himalayan region has remained one of her research interests. While a graduate student at the University of Oxford, she worked on the “The Tibet Album: British Photography in Central Tibet 1920–1950” project and the Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital 1936-1947 exhibition (2003) at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
