Sacred Place

Balarama Heller’s Sacred Place was created in the predawn hours, when the veil between the spiritual and material realms is thinnest. It is a deeply personal yet universally resonant pilgrimage exploring faith, memory, and spiritual transformation. Born into the Hare Krishna movement in America, Balarama Heller grew up within a world of devotion, ritual, and upheaval—moving through communes, countercultures, and moments of both transcendence and disillusionment. Returning to Vrindavan, India, the heart of the religion, Heller, guided by Joseph Campbell’s idea that sacred places reveal “eternity shining through time,” crafts an alchemical tapestry of archetypes both ancient and new. Sacred Place sifts through the magnetism forged by millennia of pilgrims—Heller himself among them—seeking to touch the Infinite glimmering through the present.

Balarama Heller (b. 1979, New York) is a New York City-based transmedium visual artist whose work explores the intersection of spirituality, myth, ritual, and science. Working between abstraction and representational spaces, Heller’s practice reimagines archetypal symbols, creating a visual language of preverbal awareness and photographic sublimation.

After receiving his BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in 2001 and working at Magnum Photos, Heller joined the U.S. Merchant Marines before relocating to Istanbul to document ritual and ascension throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He returned to New York in 2010.

Recent group exhibitions include Illuminations, curated by Dana Karwas at Yale University’s CCAM (2025), and Poetic Record, curated by Deana Lawson and Michael Famighetti at Princeton University (2024).

Pico Iyer is the author of 17 books—translated into 23 languages—on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to the Cuban Revolution, from the new global era to the art of stillness. For more than four decades, he has been a regular essayist for Time, The New York Times, The Financial Times, and many other leading publications worldwide. Several of his recent books have been national bestsellers.