Manish Sharma

Manish Sharma as an artist has a career of over 20 years. He was born and brought up in the city of Bikaner, Rajasthan. Thereafter he moved to Mumbai to continue his artistic practice. He currently lives and works in Jaipur, Rajasthan. His solo exhibition 'Modern Fetish' opened on 2nd Feb 2023 and continued till 2nd march, as a collateral to India Art Fair 2023.

Manish’s art originates as a cultural and political critique not only on the administrative apathy of the local governing bodies but also on all those agencies that facilitate the cannibalisation of cultures all over the world through imperialistic incursions, economic proliferation and mindless modernisation. He was particularly affected when he witnessed the bringing down of old structures in Bikaner, photographs of which he has merged with classic Rajasthani motifs and used as backdrops for the works exhibited here. He feels that one day all the ethnic cities, villages and human habitats would become museum specimens either living in the nostalgic memories of the people who had witnessed the erstwhile glory of such places or living in the government/corporate sponsored tourist guide books. His works emulate this idea of memory as museum and museum as memory and he hopes that his works would evoke empathetic relationships between the objects, the onlookers as well as cultural and economic policy makers.

In the works of Manish Sharma, the idea of nostalgia is evoked as a part of a person or a community’s strong intentions to escape from the oppressive present and take refuge in the memories of a golden past. However, the same notion of nostalgia could be a part of the political thinking of a creative person. Seen from the perspective of an artist, structuring forms that evoke political nostalgia is one of the possible ways of generating a socio-cultural and political critique.

Currently, Manish lives and works in Jaipur, Rajasthan