Vibha Galhotra Turns the Ruins of Our Cities Into a Reckoning Through Her Art

Long before Vibha Galhotra had the theoretical language for what she was seeing, she felt it. Growing up in Kaithal, Haryana, she watched rivers shrink, agricultural land disappear, and cities swell aggressively in every direction. It was not an alarm exactly, it was a low, persistent unease that lodged itself somewhere beneath thought. That unease never left her. It became, instead, the foundation of one of the most compelling conceptual practices in contemporary Indian art today.

Her formal training took her first to the Government College of Arts in Chandigarh, and then to Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan, an institution that recalibrated something essential in her. "Studying in Santiniketan changed something fundamental in me," she has said. "There, the relationship between land, learning, and living felt interconnected rather than extractive." It was there that her land-based practice began to take real shape. After settling in New Delhi in 2005, the city's own contradictions did the rest: watching the Yamuna River, reduced, polluted, burdened, while Delhi's skyline climbed ever higher, forced her to confront, as she puts it, "the absurdity of our times. How do we continue living normally beside visible collapse?"

A residency in Johannesburg deepened the practice further still. Encounters with artists such as William Kentridge and David Koloane taught her what material could truly hold, that charcoal, erasure, and restraint could carry political memory, that silence could be charged, and that fragility could be a form of dissent. These were lessons she brought back into her studio and never relinquished.

Materials as Witnesses

Galhotra's studio is populated by things the city forgets: construction rubble, metal, burnt fossil fuel residue, and thousands upon thousands of ghungroos, the small metallic bells sewn into classical dance anklets. None of it arrives as passive content. "Materials are never neutral for me," she insists. "They are evidence of their time. They carry memories. They have already lived a life before entering my studio." Her response to them is physical before it is intellectual. Sometimes the material unsettles her. Sometimes it feels wounded. Sometimes it feels complicit. That instinctive reaction, she says, always comes before language.

The ghungroo, in particular, anchors much of her practice. In their conventional life, they resonate, they announce, they celebrate. In Galhotra's hands, muted, embedded in scarred surfaces, stitched into silent formations, they become what she calls "markers of interrupted voice. Frozen sound. Suspended movement." Construction debris, too, is never simply concrete. It holds "the residue of ambition, speculation, migration, displacement." In conflict zones, it speaks of war; in coastal geographies, of floods and fires. The same material, she notes, holds multiple histories simultaneously, fragile and brutal at once. Taken together, all of the materials in her work revolve, she believes, around a single shared condition: "constant Construction, Deconstruction, and Reconstruction. Not only of cities, but of memory. Of identity. Of belief systems."

Inside the Studio, Beyond the Didactic

Galhotra's working days rarely begin with making. They begin with reading, walking, absorbing philosophy, environmental reports, poetry, and even the deliberately absurd. Her headspace, she says, is a 24/7 studio even when she is not in one. Ideas must brew until they become almost unavoidable; she does not impose form, she allows resistance. "Materials resist. Scale resists. Gravity resists. Sometimes even silence resists." She knows a work is complete not when it resolves, but when it begins to disturb her quietly, when it holds tension without explaining itself. "If it feels too resolved, too comfortable, I know it's not finished yet."

This resistance to easy resolution extends to how she thinks about satire and critique. In a climate of growing censorship and ideological pressure on artists worldwide, she remains convinced that irony still functions as a meaningful form of resistance, though its form has shifted. "We live in a time when absurdity often exceeds satire," she observes. Rather than overt humour, she argues, irony now works through displacement: a beautiful surface that conceals violence, a fragile form made from toxic material. Satire functions, she believes, when it implicates everyone, not merely governments or elites, but the viewers themselves. "That self-implication is where resistance becomes meaningful."

Thinkers such as Bruno Latour, on reorienting ourselves toward the Earth, and Achille Mbembe's writing on necropolitics inform her worldview, though they enter the work as atmospheres rather than illustrations. The concept of solastalgia, coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the grief we feel when our home environment changes irreversibly, has also taken hold. It is named, she says, something many of us carry but have never fully been able to articulate.

Witness, Archivist, Translator

Galhotra's work is now held in the collections of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, the Gates Foundation, the Singapore Art Museum, and the San José Museum of Art. She has exhibited at the Hamburg Kunsthalle, the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, and the Asia Society in New York, and has held three solo shows at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. In 2024, Goodman Gallery London presented Climacteric Whispers, her first solo UK exhibition. Honours include the Asia Arts Game Changer Award in 2019, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency in 2016, and the Jerusalem International Fellowship in 2022.

Yet none of this has softened the urgency of the central question that drives her: what does the artist actually owe the world right now? Her answer, as ever, refuses reduction. "I would not choose only one role," she says. She sees the artist today as simultaneously a witness, an archivist of emotional states, and a translator, converting ecological data into felt experience, rendering political fracture into material form. And amid the noise of climate anxiety and digital acceleration, she believes the most radical act available to an artist may simply be the creation of spaces of slowed perception: places where people are made to confront what they already sense but cannot yet process.

"Art cannot solve planetary crises," she concedes plainly. "But it can recalibrate our sensitivity to them. And sometimes, that shift in perception is where change begins." In a world that has learned to look away from visible collapse, Vibha Galhotra's practice insists, quietly and without compromise, on looking directly at it.