An Archive of Home
Anu Kumar
25.07.2025 - 23.08.2025
Opening Celebration:
Saturday 26th of July
6 - 8 pm
Anu Kumar
25.07.2025 - 23.08.2025
Opening Celebration:
Saturday 26th of July
6 - 8 pm
An Archive of Home is an ongoing photographic project that serves as both personal storytelling and collective archive-building, a visual meditation on displacement, memory, and the reconstruction of home across borders. Building upon my previous work in Ghar, this project continues to document my hometown in India as an act of preservation and connection.
The project emerges from the fracture created by migration, the inevitable gaps that form in one’s personal archive when life is lived between countries. An Archive of Home represents my attempt to piece together these fragments, capturing the small, often undocumented moments that typically slip through the cracks of memory and official
Each photograph becomes a thread in the process of mending what distance has torn, focusing on the ephemeral and the ordinary. My Nani Ji (grandmother) napping, my Nana Ji’s (grandfather) broken crockery, the gestures and possessions that carry the weight of shared history. These images speak to the universal experience of grasping at what might have been, while simultaneously creating new meaning from what is.
The project in this new chapter has deepened to encompass grief and the profound absence left by those who have passed. Having witnessed many relatives come and go, particularly my Nana Ji who built this very home, I have become increasingly drawn to exploring how we turn to religion and ritual to seek comfort and make sense of the world after someone has passed. By making these images, I investigate the ways in which the soul of someone still lingers amongst the possessions and people left behind, and how their presence continues to inhabit the spaces they once occupied, woven into the fabric of daily life and memory.
This exhibition continues the ongoing dialogue between presence and absence, between the life lived and the life imagined, inviting viewers to consider their own relationship with home, memory, and the stories we tell to understand where we come from and who we are.
Anu Kumar (she/her) is a photographic artist living and working in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). Working primarily with medium format photography, she interrogates themes of displacement and the diaspora, using her practice as a gateway to understanding her identity as a woman born in India and raised in Australia. Through her work, Kumar strives to archive the quotidian expressions of everyday life as an examination of self, family and belonging. Her photography has been featured in the New York Times and Vogue, and exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (2022), and The National Gallery of Victoria (2023) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (2024).
Kumar released her first monograph “Ghar” with Perimeter Editions, which was shortlisted for the Paris Photo- Aperture First Photobook award (2023), and winner of the Australian & New Zealand Photobook awards (2024).
The project emerges from the fracture created by migration, the inevitable gaps that form in one’s personal archive when life is lived between countries. An Archive of Home represents my attempt to piece together these fragments, capturing the small, often undocumented moments that typically slip through the cracks of memory and official
Each photograph becomes a thread in the process of mending what distance has torn, focusing on the ephemeral and the ordinary. My Nani Ji (grandmother) napping, my Nana Ji’s (grandfather) broken crockery, the gestures and possessions that carry the weight of shared history. These images speak to the universal experience of grasping at what might have been, while simultaneously creating new meaning from what is.
The project in this new chapter has deepened to encompass grief and the profound absence left by those who have passed. Having witnessed many relatives come and go, particularly my Nana Ji who built this very home, I have become increasingly drawn to exploring how we turn to religion and ritual to seek comfort and make sense of the world after someone has passed. By making these images, I investigate the ways in which the soul of someone still lingers amongst the possessions and people left behind, and how their presence continues to inhabit the spaces they once occupied, woven into the fabric of daily life and memory.
This exhibition continues the ongoing dialogue between presence and absence, between the life lived and the life imagined, inviting viewers to consider their own relationship with home, memory, and the stories we tell to understand where we come from and who we are.
Anu Kumar (she/her) is a photographic artist living and working in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). Working primarily with medium format photography, she interrogates themes of displacement and the diaspora, using her practice as a gateway to understanding her identity as a woman born in India and raised in Australia. Through her work, Kumar strives to archive the quotidian expressions of everyday life as an examination of self, family and belonging. Her photography has been featured in the New York Times and Vogue, and exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (2022), and The National Gallery of Victoria (2023) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (2024).
Kumar released her first monograph “Ghar” with Perimeter Editions, which was shortlisted for the Paris Photo- Aperture First Photobook award (2023), and winner of the Australian & New Zealand Photobook awards (2024).
