The emotional purity of Kashmir immortalized by Bharat Sikka

Bharat Sikka was born in Karnataka, India, in 1973 where he grew up and developed his passion for fine arts and started his career as a photographer before moving to New York to study at Parson's School of Design. Currently in a perpetual journey between New Dehli and New York, his works question the Indian conventional perspective focusing on social criticism through observation of the world around him.

After his first exhibition, Indian Men, his works have been published on several national and international magazines and exhibited in some of the most important contemporary institutions of the artistic landscape since 2009.

His latest photographic project, Where the flowers still grow, tells through the intimacy of Bharat's lens the Indian Kashmir region, torn from the 1980s by political conflicts that have deeply marked the cultural identity not only of the region but of the entire nation. From a series of trips between 2014 and 2015, Bharat Sikka produced a single body of work that transcends the political resulting as a meditation on the state of the landscape and of those who inhabit the region.

In the images of Where the flowers still grow, Bharat blends man and landscape into one, a single representation of the bucolic purity of Kashmir while, at the same time, he points a spotlight on the constant and essential indifference of the natural world towards the problems of men: a masterful representation of the emotional experience lived by Bharat during his travels to Kashmir and the mute testimony of those who have never been heard.

After being exhibited during the Kochi-Muziris Biennial 2016 and Nature Death in 2017, Where the flowers still grow by Bharat Sikka was recently released by the independent publishing house Loose Joints and has been selected by the visual project Edicola for its latest issue, the double.

Discover Where the flowers still grow on Edicola.