From issue: #32 Un/Stable
Barkat Mehra, 02 October 2026
Underwood is a manifesto of familial ties, admiration and awakening. This project, set within the walls of a century-old house in south-east England, engages in a dialogue between Barkat’s family and the multifaceted history of the house and its inhabitants who came before. As the child of Indian immigrants, Barkat views her surroundings in relation to her diverse heritage, where British ideals leave Indian beliefs without nurture. The loss of Barkat’s older brother launched her family into sentimental surrender, driving Barkat and her parents to extract a newfound character from their eternal abode.
Customs and cultures that sit opposite one another leave Barkat and her family in no man’s land, where creation cultivates an intangible memorandum. These photographs encounter power, grief and hysteria, but most importantly, love. What remains of others and of Barkat’s family creates a unique visual identity that is the essence of this story. Underwood sees through combined histories that journey into everlasting memories. Moments in the garden, on carpets, through windows and under sunlight create passages of time that hold both the past and present in anticipation of a perceivable future.
Through these glimpses, Barkat and her parents heal, contract and memorialise their sanctuary. Underwood redefines parent-child norms and cross-cultural barriers, speaking to the unequivocal human nature that structures us all.
Barkat Mehra is a photographer born in the United Kingdom to Indian parents, whose work moves between memory and geography, absence and return—between places, histories, and the quiet spaces in between. She graduated from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2024 with a BA in Economics and a BFA in Studio Art, where her practice began as a way of reconciling distance: childhood and adulthood, India and the UK, intimacy and estrangement. While in the United States, her work turned toward familial connection—its comforts and absences, inheritances and ruptures— shaped by psychoanalytic thought. Through image-making, she traces belonging, exploring what endures between people and places. Her photographs act as containers of feeling, where gestures and spaces hold what is left unsaid—subconscious movements, inherited habits, and emotional imprints that persist across time and place. Across her work, she returns to questions of trauma, longing, gender and identity, often using her own family to examine the roles and expectations we inherit and the ways they can be unsettled or reimagined. Her current project, Underwood, continues this introspection on grief, ove, and generational bonds. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Chennai Photo Biennale and Tate Britain. Her images dwell in the emotional architectures we inherit, offering a testament to endurance, transformation, and belonging.