Manjari Sharma: तत् त्वम् असि (Tat Tvam Asi)
The Universe is a Mirror

September 13 – December 7, 2024

Artist Talk: Monday, October 14 5:30-7:30 pm

Manjari Sharma is a Mumbai-born, LA-based artist exploring ritual, identity, memory, and mythology. Sharma’s 2023 exhibition Expanding Darshan, which combined the diverse historic collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art and the artist’s ongoing Darshan series, a photographic re-imagining of Hindu deities, received wide critical acclaim.

In 2022, Sharma began working closely with AEIVA over two years to plan a series of images composed of elaborate, life-size set constructions photographed on-location in India. These works offer a speculative fiction-based presentation of the spiritual concepts of Hindu rituals of death and the afterlife with mankind’s scientific curiosity and exploration of the universe, as Sharma visualizes her own mother’s transition into the afterlife.

A second exhibition titled Looking for a Silver Lining follows her family’s decade-long battle with frontotemporal dementia. This companion exhibition was developed in partnership with UAB’s Arts in Medicine and will open October 16 at the UAB Brain Aging and Memory Hub on the fifth floor of Callahan Eye Hospital.

Sharma’s work can be found in the New York Times, Vice Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, and NPR, to name a few, and projects have been published and exhibited in galleries, museums, and festivals worldwide. Sharma is a proud recipient of the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2024), and her works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Carlos Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Birmingham Museum of Art.

Cover image: Manjari Sharma, Garuda, 2024. Archival pigment print. Courtesy of the artist.