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 and familial images, 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. In this body of work, the landscape tells the story. The portrait insists we do not forget who lived it.​

While these works are deeply rooted in my ancestral history, they profoundly explore universal facets of the human spirit. The portraits serve as intense psychological studies of resilience in the face of adversity, and the landscapes emerge as palpable fields of collective memory.

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