The Open Studio / Harish Sharma
Harish Sharma
The Residue
What stays on the wire after the people have gone
Brown dark as old tea, lit here and there with rust and gold.
Line after line of wire runs across, each knot a small closed fist.
White cloth hangs from the barbs, thin as a shirt worn too long.
One rag has slipped low and holds on by a corner.
Behind the wire a brown shape waits, folded like a bag no one came back for.
The light keeps returning to the cloth.
The work
Harish Sharma paints torn white cloth caught on rows of barbed wire. The rags hang like things left behind after people have crossed. Sharma is studying for a Master of Fine Arts in Painting at Jamia Millia Islamia. His family comes from a village in Bihar. His father went to Delhi first to find work. Later the family built their own home in Haryana. Sharma works in acrylic. He lays a dark brown ground with patches of amber light. Each barb of wire is painted clearly.
In the artist’s words
“Residue uses torn fabric on barbed wire to show the painful history and broken identity of migrants. I try to show a deep, painful erasure, where left-behind remnants tell a story of displacement and bureaucratic struggle. When someone migrates, their past history almost vanishes. They have to start again from zero.”
- Theme
- Migration and lost identity
- Material
- Acrylic on canvas
- Size
- 60.96 × 76.2 × 2.54 cm
- Year
- 2026
- Edition
- When a person migrates to a new city in search of a better life, they aren't just starting over—they are stepping into an absolute erasure. The moment they cross that boundary, their entire past is wiped clean. It’s as if the history, the community, and the very footprints of everyone who lived before them never existed. That is the heavy, unspoken cost of progress: you trade your entire history for the possibility of a future.
- Framed
- Yes
- About the artist
- Jamia millia islamia
- From
- Faridabad
- Code
- RC-302
