Through fractured, haunting portraits and landscapes, Anoushka Bhalla explores the trauma of displacement within South Asia’s colonial and postcolonial history. There is an intentional dialogue between land and face, manifested through distinct textural languages. The landscapes function as metaphors—burning lands, spectral ships, scorched seas—symbols of her ancestors’ forced migrations and erasures; their rakish, hazy textures implying the elusive, fragmented nature of memory and time. These are memory-fields haunted by those who fled, those who perished, and those who were never remembered. The portraits, drawn from South Asian photographic archives, familial images and personal memory, put faces to these stories. These individuals—sometimes her own ancestors, sometimes anonymous yet familiar—appear in moments of confrontation, solitude, hope, and madness, rendered with structured, visceral knife strokes that animate their immediate, lived emotional aftermath of partition, exile, and generational loss.

Across both portrait and landscape, Bhalla employs fractured surfaces—cracked textures, ruptured layers, exposed underpaintings—as visual analogues for historical rupture and psychic fragmentation. Terracotta plays a vital role in this material vocabulary. She uses it not only for its earthbound associations with land, ritual, and ancestry, but also for its archaeological weight. Its surface—scored, worn, and intentionally eroded—serves as both site and symbol of excavation. In Bhalla’s work, terracotta holds the residue of cultural displacement and acts as an enduring, unstable terrain through which memory is made visible. In this body of work, the landscape tells the story. The portrait insists we do not forget who lived it.​

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Anoushka Bhalla (b. India) lives and works in New York City.