A Room for Refuge: A Solo Exhibition by Anupama Alias Anil

Drawn first into a form of nebulous white, then led through an aqueous panorama,
you are swept into the brownish-orange highlight—before being pushed out by
maroon-rust smoke held in an elliptical pool, dissolving into a mild penumbra, the
images hesitate at their seams.

In this solo exhibition, Anupama Alias Anil often embraces a deliberate edge of
uncertainty in her paintings that folds reality into the sleepwalk of memory. In her
explorations of watercolour, in Witness Embers (2025), the subject—mostly
herself—pools into view with a gossamer-light touch, against a morphed flora and
fauna, adding a sense of travelling through thoughts, as moving across an open
terrain where nothing stays fixed on the surface. On perusal, the figure, the tree,
the branch, and the grass all take on different tenors, guiding you toward a sense
of ground.

Born and raised in Angamaly, Kerala, Anupama offers paintings, sculptures, and
assemblages drawn from interconnected bodies of work that consider a
transitional time of being—in the self-other, myth-reality, tangible-intangible,
known-unknown.

In her compositional quietude, Anupama re-visualises form and re-envisions the
self not only as individual, but as a vessel of collective imagination. In Interlaced
Journeys (2025), she intervenes as both performer and poser. This time, colour
takes a significant role—with the shift to oil, its creamy, controlled surface that
contrasts with watercolour’s fluid and accidental nature. In Island of Hope (2021),
by reducing the horizontal expanse of the composition, she layers images by
incident, not accident. Her range of hues conjures a dream-like atmosphere,
flickering softly—a Byzantine glow, adding to it a strangeness and curious element.
Anupama’s palette recalls the lightness of Aegean frescos. Other small paintings
in the Infinite Realities (2024) series are thinly stained, leaving behind residues of
emotion.

In another mixed media work, Anupama’s female protagonists find themselves in
strange circumstances—performing vulnerability shrouded in beak-masks. Alias
paints a dense and ambiguous environment that serves both as a literal and
symbolic alteration of self. In Hidden Meaning of the Last Meal (2019), the
protagonists appear in staged tableau of inscrutable objects, alluding to the
performative enactment of identity. The work masks a dissolution between self and
other, personal and collective, gender and identity. Anupama invites us to reflect:
how does one come to recognise the thrum of disquiet? When does disturbance stop
being something outside us—and instead become part of who we are?

A Room for Refuge draws on Alias’s studio—a space she inhabits and that is vital to
how the works come into being. Her studio holds piles of accumulated materials—
cotton and wool threads spread across the table. On some days, it carries the
gestures of her womenfolk and their shared acts of gathering, weaving, and
making. This act eventually translates into Memory of Memories (2025), where glass
jars incubate a flowery spinal form. In another, a face set within floral fabric,
materialises what the artist describes as her “own sighs and throbs,” taking the
body out of the familiar syntax of human anatomy. These pieces are propositions,
suggesting a way into recollection, inviting one to imagine presence against
absence. As one moves through the gallery, carried by the tenderness of her
works, an insistence lingers in Anupama’s paintings—breath becomes a room.

– Shruti Ramlingaiah