Meet Kanishka Puri, Chandigarh-born artist capturing strength through lens

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From Goa’s female lifeguards to Hawaii’s fragile landscapes, her work explores femininity, resilience & changing natural world

Chandigarh, September 4

What happens when tenderness is viewed not as the opposite of strength, but as one of its forms? For Chandigarh-born visual artist and photographer Kanishka Puri, that question lies at the heart of her practice.

Her latest photography exhibition, The Wild and the Tender, which concluded at Punjab Kala Bhawan in Sector 16, Chandigarh, on Thursday, brought together 27 photographs captured over three years. Made across Goa and Hawaii, the works explore women and the natural world through a shared lens of resilience, vulnerability, adaptation and change.

The exhibition brings together two distinct bodies of work. Yet beneath their contrasting landscapes runs a common thread, an interest in how women and nature respond to pressure, negotiate uncertainty and continually transform.

Women who face the tide

In Goa, Puri photographed India’s first female lifeguards along the Arabian Sea. Her work goes beyond documenting women in a profession traditionally associated with men, focusing instead on their courage, alertness and ability to respond to an unpredictable environment.

The sea becomes an important presence in these photographs, portrayed as powerful, restless and constantly shifting. It mirrors the qualities Puri finds in the women themselves, including adaptability, attentiveness and strength.

Rather than presenting the lifeguards simply as women breaking into a male-dominated space, the artist allows their presence to speak for itself. They emerge as professionals whose relationship with the sea is built on skill, confidence and constant awareness.

Finding stories in nature

In Hawaii, Puri’s gaze shifts from women to volcanic terrain, vegetation, the Pacific and changing light. Here too, she finds a language for resilience.

The landscapes carry both beauty and vulnerability, particularly as rising temperatures, changing coastlines and extreme weather reshape the environments they inhabit.

For Puri, this relationship with the natural world goes beyond observation. Through her collaboration with non-human life, she explores possibilities for creating new narratives beyond inherited structures. As she puts it, “This kind of oneness with nature allows us to explore potential narratives that could exist instead of the ones that have existed before, narratives that do not serve us. The way we read our history does not always serve us as women and so we have to create our own.”

That idea brings the two bodies of work together. Femininity and nature are neither passive nor delicate in Puri’s visual world. Both absorb pressure, respond to their surroundings and evolve.

From City Beautiful to wider worlds

Born in Chandigarh, Puri completed her MFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design in 2025. Her work has been exhibited at Baxter St, Elizabeth Street Garden, Photoville and Stephen Kellen Gallery in New York, the Lishui Photography Festival in China, Jaipur Arts Week in India and Women Made Gallery in Chicago.

Her writing has appeared in Back Matter Magazine, Rukhmabai Initiatives and Columbia Journal. She has also presented her research through artist talks at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and the Saas Fee Summer Institute of Art in Paris.

Supported by Chandigarh Lalit Kala Akademi, The Wild and the Tender ultimately offers a different way of looking at strength; one that leaves room for tenderness, vulnerability and change.

Through women facing the sea and landscapes shaped by nature, Puri finds a common language: The ability to endure, adapt and create anew.