Anoushka Bhalla
Pathos-- Portraits from the Lost Homeland 2024
Oil and Indian terracotta on canvas
 
Pathos a work from the "Portraits from the Lost Homeland" series, engages with the profound memory void that haunts postcolonial India. In this series, by intensely cropping and zooming into anonymous portraits sourced from South Asian photographic archives, the work intentionally abstracts the individual face. This act of re-contextualization transcends individual identity, allowing the portrait to embody a collective, universal sense of grief and the pathos of exile. Through this process, I seek to locate my own lineage within a broader history of familial and cultural loss, giving form to an inherited pathos that exists beyond a specific person. The work becomes an act of empathy, a search for a recognizable anguish that links personal history to the anonymous faces of the past.