Anu Kumar
Anu Kumar
(b. 1990, Delhi, India. Lives and works in Melbourne)
Anu Kumar is a photographic artist who works primarily with medium-format photography. She frequently uses her practice as a way to understand her identity as a woman born in India and raised in Australia, interrogating themes of displacement and diaspora.
For Melbourne Now, Kumar presents a series of photographs from her Nagar series, 2022. Meaning ‘town’ in Hindi, Nagar is a body of work created in Kavi Nagar, Ghaziabad, where the artist was born before moving to Australia with her family at eight months old. Though based in Australia for most of her life, Kumar would visit Kavi Nagar regularly with her family in her childhood and adolescence. ‘The images, made during daily 4pm walks with my aunts, represent a starting point. The beginning of a sustained effort to reconnect with, and understand, my heritage,’ says Kumar. Together, the images form an expression of everyday life and a personal examination of the self, of family and of belonging.
Kumar’s photography has been published in the New York Times and Vogue Italia, as well as in a monograph with Perimeter Editions entitled Ghar (2022), meaning ‘home’ in Hindi. She has also exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (2022).