Emergent Realities

Emergent Realities is a newly commissioned three-channel animation by Sharmistha Ray that collages painting, original and found footage, and cosmic imagery into a layered visual odyssey. Spanning the ecological, cosmic, and psychological, the work collapses linear time into a simultaneous, immersive experience. Each channel operates both independently and in dialogue—projecting fragments of satellites drifting, comets arcing across space, painterly textures dissolving into stellar dust, and archival visions of the cosmos. By juxtaposing representations of deep time and human perception, the animation explores the simultaneity of cause and effect—not as a chain, but as a coexistent field. Solar flares ripple through painted abstractions; ecological collapse echoes in planetary drift; memory and future blur within the folds of light and motion. The viewer is drawn into a perceptual vortex where time loops, splinters, and converges. 

Spanning terrestrial, solar, and cosmic realms, the three channels each represent spatial dimensions that correspond to variants of time. Building upon Ray’s interest in cosmology and consciousness, these animations fuse color and compositional theory from modernist abstraction with ancient renderings of the sacred from eastern cultures that adapted abstract forms to represent consciousness. Our bodies are composed of the same atomic matter as the cosmos. Far from being essentialist, Ray uses this chemical fact to set the stage for philosophical hypothesizing of ourselves as expansive and phenomenal, the stuff of microbes, memories, minerals, and stars. The visual and hypothetical poetics of outer space, which like the mineral compounds of our bodies, are invisible to our naked eye. But what if we close our eyes? What if we imagine these outer-verses as a framework for reconstructing notions of the self, beyond the limiting structures of nations and borders and individuals, but as quantum stuff, in a state of constant relation, flux, and change? Drawing upon modernist aesthetics, Sharmistha imagines physical and philosophical cosmic matter like revolving and orbital planets, digital pixels, churning energy (“chakra”) wheels, comets, drones, gemstones, pulsating stars, navigational compasses, and other organic and inorganic phenomena to symbolize inner radiance and the phenomenological possibilities of psychical re-orientations. Emergent Realities suggests that we are all made up of an unseen web of countless entanglements across space-time, and that seeing ourselves and each other as permeable —a part of this incalculably vast interdependence –can help us to imagine new collective (and connective) frameworks for liberation and justice.
 
At the heart of Ray’s practice is a desire to transcend traditional boundaries—whether they are cultural, political, or artistic. Their work is a vehicle for radical reimagining, a search for belonging within a world that constantly shifts. In this search, they aim to create spaces of inclusion and reflection, where the complexities of identity, memory, and history can be re-envisioned. Their art becomes a means of engaging in a deep, transformative dialogue with viewers, inviting them to actively participate in rethinking not just what art can be, but also how we can interact with the world and one another in more inclusive, dynamic ways. Through their projects, Ray seeks to cultivate spaces that are not only reflective but also deeply transformative—where personal histories can connect with collective ones, and where new pathways for belonging and understanding can emerge in iterative and complex ways that challenge normative paradigms for being and feeling in this world.

Complementing Ray’s animation is Kinship, a newly commissioned sound composition by Arooj Aftab. Created in collaboration with Ray, Kinship reflects on how connection transforms—how things that begin together can drift, change form, and still remain linked through unseen frequencies of relation. Moving like a pulse—steady yet mutable—the piece layers transmissions of sound that seem to recognize one another in passing, drawn from a shared origin yet subtly altered with each encounter. Familiar forms evolve through these exchanges, growing distant, unfamiliar, until they become strangers—yet still bound by resonance, by a faint recognition that endures through change. Ray’s animated imagery and Aftab’s score weave in and out, converging and moving together at times, and at other moments, layers of sound and image splinter and diverge to plot their own spatial locations. The result is both harmony and dissonance.
 
Emergent Realities, accompanied by Aftab’s new score, invites the viewer to inhabit a temporal ecology—one in which every moment is simultaneously origin, consequence, and reflection, folded into the infinite continuity of space-time.