never leaving never arriving
“Chasing the soul
dear life-line,
dear colonial entanglement,
dear unintentional togetherness and relatedness,
dear future,
Fragmentary notes. Either happy or terribly sad. This leaves us chasing, always chasing.”
An article for Metropolis M to be published in September 2022 on International Students and every racism and discrimination. This research consists of 8 conversations with ex-students and their struggles in the Netherlands. This article makes visible mutual vulnerabilities faced by international students and sheds light on the lack of supportive structures in place to […]
A sharing of artworks, texts and performances by 5 HKU Master Fine Art alumni, in collaboration with Utrecht University Law Faculty. ART. 1 explores how Article 1 of the Dutch constitution translates and unfolds in both personal and political urgencies when considering equality and discrimination. Together, the participating artists try to navigate their positions through […]
Solo exhibition at MIJ Ijsselstein, from April – July 2022. Where does kinship begin and where does it end? How far reaching is it? Who and what does kinship include and exclude? If kinship speaks of belonging then it must also speak of exclusion. Who are the gatekeepers? Who decides with whom and what we […]
Bus journeys, story-telling performance at the Annual Danish European Community Studies Association Conference. Panelist in conference in Copenhagen on mobility and European crises, on everydayness. Duration 30 minutes, December 2021. Co-writing and reading diasporic bus journeys that encapsulate the notion of ‘always just arriving to Europe’. Writing bus journey stories as ways of being together […]
Collaborative essay, which joins a bundle of essay in a book on migration and data currently being printed at Nijmegen University. Expected summer 2022. Abstract The term “irregular” attached to “migration” or a “migrant” assumes the existence of regular migration and a regular migrant. However, who defines a process, person or activity as regular or […]
Notes on arrival/mental health/departure, sample of one of many notes on paper, continuous work in process as of 2019.
Cargo of Souls is a working title for my current work based on conversations with my mother. My mother passed away in 2018 at an approximate age of 75, her date of birth in her passport was a guess. The cause of her depression remains sunken, but there is a direct link to the bloody […]
Autobiography as Methodology, Forum+, autumn issue 2020 In this essay, I reflect on the use of autobiography as a methodology for story-telling in the visual arts. There is a focus on the methods used to explore the self and its relatedness to the world that one wishes to grasp. It sheds light on how autobiography […]
Podcast, for Decolonial Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, duration 8″27″ minutes, 2020.
Fluid Horizons, work in progress, 2020, hand printed ink on paper, work in process, possibly 6 drawings of 44 x 55 cm Fluid Horizons is based on the exploration into the understanding of how fluid our internal and external borders have become. Both manmade and natural boarders are constantly being re-drawn due to geopolitical entanglements […]
Time-line and bodies is an ongoing life-time text wherein each year I update my time-line based on memory, focus, events and predictions. The text can be viewed under heading Biography. Printed on paper, size can vary, approximately 35cm x 100cm, 2020, Trainings for the not yet, BAK, Utrecht.
Here and There, 2019, film-essay, 13’ 00’’. This poetic-film-essay is based on the exploration of how a diasporic body struggles with its internalised words to speak out – a shifting reality. There is no intention to make a conclusion, but to leave an impression of how it is to be a foreigner in your home-country, feared […]
Manju Sharma, Citizens of Elsewhere, 2019, written work, 15,300 words. The libretto contains two letters of exchange, poems, music pieces, description of objects portraying nation and home. One letter is written to “Two minutes of Silence,” in which I try to understand why and how the western world is so fanatical with the WWII and remembering. […]
Manju Sharma, Please keep me with you at all times, 2019, reading-performance, 30min. During the performance, I read a part of my written work and move through the available space and among the audience leaving uncomfortable silences that mirror how women of colour are often silenced by institutional structures still in place today. My reading is […]
The suitcase represents the baggage that we carry around with us, baggage as in cultural heritage, and the miss-match of cultures. It addresses the notion of home, and the importance to unpack the baggage that we carry around with us. Growing up in Britain, and in particular London, there was at first a threat of […]
Chasing clouds is about how war, heritage and displacement create borders and traumas that shape-shift through to the next generations.
Please keep me with you at all times, 2019, reading-performance, 30min, Futures Without (graduation exhibition) BAK, Utrecht.
Out of the plastic are 5 paintings. The title refers to photos that are never shared but remain protected behind a thin sheet of plastic in a family album. The gap between trying to preserve and keeping safe a culture and identity, and adjusting to one which changes according to the political climate. Our exoticness, […]