In a meditative exploration of cultural identity and familial bonds, Melbourne-based photographer Anu Kumar has conceived an exclusive public installation for CONTACT 2025, presenting works drawn from her acclaimed series Ghar. This marks a significant moment for the artist, as her deeply personal work traverses hemispheres from her home in Melbourne, Australia, to be presented on billboards on the streets of Toronto, in her first public artwork in Canada.

Bridging Worlds: Anu Kumar's Ghar
Elias Redstone

The series Ghar, which means “home” in Hindi, began from a profound sense of displacement during Kumar’s first return to Kavi Nagar, India, at age twenty-one. Having left her birthplace in childhood, she found herself grappling with the complexities of cultural identity. “I remember a feeling of discomfort, of not knowing my place or who I was in that context,” Kumar reflects. Photography became her tool for cultural reconnection, a means of “learning how to be Indian.” Over a period of five years, she documented life in her family home in Kavi Nagar using a medium-format camera—capturing both formal family portraits and quiet, unguarded moments—creating a visual archive of domestic life, and an alternative family album. The resulting book was edited and sequenced during the COVID-19 border closures, which added a further layer of significance to this exploration of home—simultaneously a physical place, an emotional state, and a cultural responsibility.

The installation in Toronto features two portraits from Ghar, both showing Kumar's Nani lying on her bed, but taken a year apart. One features her head seen from behind, the other, her feet, with her soles marked by her sandals. While the images serve as temporal markers for the artist, the passing of time is indistinct for the viewer—the bed sheets and the quality of the light are the same in each image, and in this context embody moments of intimacy between grandmother and daughter, a moment that might otherwise fade into the undocumented everyday. The significance of presenting this work in Toronto adds another layer to Kumar's exploration of displacement and belonging. As her intimate family portraits find a home in North America, they speak to the universal experience of diaspora communities and the way personal narratives can resonate across cultural boundaries. The installation transforms private moments into shared experiences, inviting Torontonians to reflect on their own stories of migration and cultural identity.

As Ghar finds its place in Toronto's cultural landscape, it demonstrates how deeply personal art can transcend geographical boundaries to speak to universal human experiences. The installation stands as a testament to the power of photography to preserve cultural memory while creating new dialogues across continents. In bringing these intimate family portraits to Toronto, Kumar's work continues to explore and challenge ideas of belonging, proving that stories of identity and familial bonds can resonate far from their points of origin.

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This installation marks the second cycle in the strategic partnership between CONTACT Photography Festival and PHOTO Australia, following the installation by Atong Atem in Toronto in 2022, and works by Dana Claxton and Eve Tagny presented as outdoor installations in Australia at PHOTO 2022 and PHOTO 2024 respectively. 

Presented by CONTACT in partnership with PHOTO Australia. Supported by Pattison Outdoor Advertising

Curated by Elias Redstone

• 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), National Portrait Gallery of Australia (2025) 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).

• Elias Redstone is the Founder and Artistic Director of PHOTO Australia and PHOTO International Festival of Photography, Melbourne. Presenting free gallery exhibitions and large-scale public artworks, PHOTO 2021, 2022 and 2024 were collectively viewed by over 500,000 people and featured artists such as Nan Goldin, Zanele Muholi, Cindy Sherman, Ryan McGinley and Malick Sidibé. PHOTO 2026 will take place 6–29 March 2026.