The god who never wanted to leave

A masked figure stands outside the British Museum, one of the largest repositories of sacred and ancient objects collected from all over the world.

Around it tourists, students, office workers stream out of the gate, none of them looking twice at the man in the mask. This is the image that photographer Aayush Shrestha keeps returning to (right). Not because it is the most striking in his new picture book, but because it represents what he set out to say: a god can stand in the middle of a big city and go entirely unnoticed.

Tittled The Unwilling Travellers, the book imagines sacred sculptures taken out of the Kathmandu Valley over the past century and now sitting in museums and private collections across the West as reluctant migrants, still adjusting, decades on, to lives in exhibit stands or in underground storage.

“When I first went to the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert I was upset to see the Nepali gods inside glass boxes,” Shrestha says. “As humans we migrate with purpose, but the gods were forced away from their places. They are still waiting to go home.”