Kismuth means ‘destiny’.

It’s a memoir series by Dipika Kohli. She’s a writer, conversation salon host, and experiential learning workshop designer, a fan of baseball and those occasional chance encounters one gets to have in life that help us see who we really are.

 

Dipika Kohli is a bricolage artist who makes art books and zines in Phnom Penh. Using found materials–glossy magazines, broken foreign-language novels, thin or thick papers, cut boxes, scraps of textiles, leaves and flowers, beads, and pages of her own diaristic writings–she stitches closed layered pages that enfold juxtaposed stories. Each reading reveals a new telling, each person viewing interprets in a new way. What holds Kohli’s attention is the chance and ephemerality of this, and the anticipation of new possibilities, too. For the same reason, she hosts salons and miniparties, so people can meet and co-discover what may surprise or delight them. As such, hers is a relational art. Her books are artefacts of these encounters. They’re expressions of being immersed, and at play. Kohli’s zines have officially been in shows and festivals in Seattle, Oulu, San Francisco, and Sapporo and at popup fringe events she’s hosted in London, Bangkok, and Singapore. She co-founded Design Kompany in Seattle, which set a foundation for what today is a smaller scale version of shaping space for people to try new things, in the Art & Copy Zine Club. DK today makes DESK.

KISMUTH BOOKS. Dipika Kohli’s first published book was The Elopement. Set in southwest Ireland, it asks, ‘How much is too much to trade for a promise of love?’ The Elopement was the first in the Kismuth series. When comes to make a major life decision, whom to marry, naturally it’s a big deal, and people got very curious. (The other books in the four-volume series are: The Dive, Kanishka, and Breakfast in Cambodia. Each asks a version of the query, ‘What about if?’) Love, loss, risk, and chance are the themes. After all, ‘kismuth’ means ‘destiny.’ ‘The series is inspired by something my grandmother used to say: Everything is already written in the stars.

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PUBLISHING PROJECTS. Dipika Kohli publishes the magazine DESK and edits Art & Copy, a zine made in Art & Copy Zine Club. Thatis is one of the tracks of Cojournal, a place for people to write with others in small circles of no more than four. See: kismuth.com/cojournal2026. She writes a monthly column for Saathee Magazine (Charlotte, NC).

JAPAN PROJECTS. Dipika’s 2024 zines included a series called S P A C E | The Way. See dipikakohli.com/the-way. She was part of an artist residency in Sapporo at Sapporo Tenjinyama Artist Studio in 2025, where she hosted ‘Speaking in the Spaces’. More: Sapporo. She studied Japanese at Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies and won two grants from the Japan Foundation for photography.

CAMBODIA PROJECTS. From Atelier S P A C E World Headquarters in Phnom Penh, we’re co-making the monthly zine Art & Copy with people near and far who care about inquiry, learning, discovery, and conversations with others who are aligned in these ways. We connect up in small groups of 3-4 in ways designed to invite new people to find perspectives they might not have otherwise had a chance to experience, thanks to the careful selection and curation of each group’s themes and an ‘open space’ style ‘unconference’ mode to join conversations that are of interest. This is a very loose, light, extremely powerful way of gathering that invites and gives us a chance to meander through the creative process. Then make a ‘zine’. See kismuth.com/zineclub2026 for an idea of what the final outcomes look like, in their printed forms.