Harsha’s practice includes painting, large scale installations and community projects. Often working within the context of the narrative traditions of Indian miniature painting, Harsha’s work reveals a political commentary where figures in his delicate, sly and playful world are almost invariably focused on an event, animated by a mutual curiosity, pointing out something that is odd, incongruous or comically strange. For the viewer the wit resides as much in the scale of the depictions as it does in the finely summarised and telling detail of the vignette.

In his recent work Cosmic Orphans (2006) a site-specific painting installation at the Sri Krishnan Temple created for the Singapore Biennale, Harsha covered the entire surface of the rooftop above the inner sanctum and the floor surrounding the temple’s tower with paintings of sleeping figures. Painted directly onto the floor using flat colours, the figures occupy a space not normally associated with traditional painting – their displacement provoking the audience to consider what is permitted and forbidden in relation to where they tread in the temple.