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

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 2024, Sharma will create a two-part collaborative exhibition between AEIVA and UAB’s Arts in Medicine. While one exhibit follows her family’s decade-long battle with Frontotemporal Dementia, the other is a speculative fiction-based project that collages spiritual concepts of the Hindu rituals of death and the afterlife with mankind’s scientific curiosity and exploration of the Universe. These two exhibitions will open at AEIVA and UAB’s Brain Aging and Memory Clinic in 2024.

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, and the Birmingham Museum of Art.

IMAGE CREDIT // Manjari Sharma, Garuda’s Wisdom (detail), 2024. Archival pigment print. Courtesy of the artist.