Talking Pictures
Irina Rozovsky and Manjari Sharma
January 3–February 3, 2019
Artist talk: Saturday, February 2, 3:00 PM
Originally commissioned by curator Mia Fineman for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Talking Pictures is a photographic conversation between Manjari Sharma and Irina Rozovsky. Over a five-month period surrounding the 2017 US election, the two artists exchanged iPhone photos in real time using a call-and-response format. Living different lives in different cities, Sharma and Rozovsky approached the exchange as a form of modern-day letter writing. Their improvisational images reveal personal chronologies that exist within public and private spaces and respond to current political tensions. Most importantly, the dialogue is focused on the creation of new life at such a precarious time, as the artists, both pregnant during this project, conclude the 122 image conversation with the arrival of their newborns.
Irina Rozovsky was born in Moscow and raised in the United States. She is currently based in Athens, Georgia. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Smith College in Northampton, MA; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA; Breda International Photo Festival in Breda, The Netherlands; Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, PA; Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee, WI; Chelsea Art Museum in New York, NY; Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, FL; and Noorderlicht Festival in Groningen, The Netherlands. Rozovsky participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in August 2012.
Manjari Sharma is an internationally published photo-based artist born and raised in Mumbai, India, and currently residing in southern California. In addition to many private collections, Sharma’s work is represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and has been showcased in solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Sharma holds a bachelor’s degree in Visual Communication from S.N.D.T University in Mumbai and a BFA in Still Photography from Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio.