Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad, is proud to present A Room for Refuge, a solo exhibition by contemporary artist Anupama Alias Anil, opening on Sunday, 5th October 2025. On view until 9th November 2025, the exhibition showcases a remarkable collection of paintings, sculptures, and assemblages that delve into themes of identity, memory, and transformation.
A Journey Through Transition and Selfhood
Walking into A Room for Refuge, viewers are first drawn into a nebulous white space, before being carried through fluid panoramas of color and texture. Shades of brownish-orange, maroon-rust, and elliptical forms create an atmosphere that feels at once meditative and dynamic. Figures, trees, branches, and grasses emerge across these topographies, guiding us toward a grounding presence even as the forms shift and dissolve
Anupama’s works explore the in-between spaces of being the self and the other, the myth and the real, the tangible and the intangible. With a quiet intensity, her compositions invite viewers to re-envision identity, particularly through her recurring female protagonists. These figures, part-performers and part-posers, occupy ambiguous environments that blur boundaries between personal and collective, gender and identity, memory and imagination.
Autobiography, Memory, and the Studio as Refuge
Born and raised in Angamaly, Kerala, Anupama Alias Anil draws deeply from her own experiences and memories. Her studio becomes both sanctuary and stage an intimate space shaped by gestures of women in her family, shared acts of weaving, gathering, and making. The exhibition’s title, A Room for Refuge, extends this idea: refuge as a passage into remembering, a vessel for presence, and a space where breath itself becomes art
Anupama (b.1990) has long been interested in depicting women at transitional phases of life. While her earlier works centered on adolescence, this body of work focuses on the “middle years”moments of vulnerability, change, and becoming.
Her practice often circles back to the metaphor of the rib, inspired by the story of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib. The rib cage, for her, is not only anatomical but symbolic: a spine that structures the self, an opening into deeper explorations of anatomy, body, and metaphysics. Through this lens, her work becomes a meditation on womanhood, identity, and the fluidity of existence.
Exhibition Details Venue: Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad Dates: 5th October – 9th November 2025 Timings: 12:00 pm – 7:00 pm daily
