The San Antonio Museum of Art’s spring exhibition blends the ancient and the modern in exploration of breathtaking imagery that’s sacred to more than a billion people.
“Envisioning the Hindu Divine: Expanding Darshan and Manjari Sharma” combines nine large-scale photos by India-born and now U.S.-based visual artist Sharma. She created the colorful and breathtaking images — which depict nine of the Hindu pantheon’s most-recognizable gods — by costuming people and outfitting them with props often associated with the individual deities.
Accompanying the photos are 40 historical works, mostly statues from various parts of South Asia, depicting the same gods. All of the deities are still widely worshiped by the faith’s 1.2 million followers in India and around the world.
Together, the creations explore the Hindu concept of darshan, which is a moment of seeing and being seen by the divine, often through viewing the image of a deity.
The traveling exhibition originated at Alabama’s Birmingham Museum of Art and will remain on display at SAMA through July 6.
To get a deeper understanding of the work and what it represents, the Current spoke with both Sharma and Katherine Anne Paul, the Virginia and William M. Spencer III Curator of Asian Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art.
Katherine Anne Paul
One of the surprising things about the exhibition is that so many of the works are from outside India, Hinduism’s birthplace. Does the influence of the religion across so much of South Asia speak to the power of the imagery and to the personas of the deities themselves?
That’s very true, and I think the reality is that many people within India are completely unaware that Hinduism extended far beyond India. One of the goals of the exhibition was not only to teach people who were outside the Hindu tradition, but to teach people inside the Hindu tradition the resident impact that Hinduism had and continues to have in Southeast Asia.
The exhibition also encompasses a long stretch of time. Some of the sculptures date back hundreds of years, yet the photographic component is recent enough that the artist, Manjari Sharma, brought it about through a crowdfunding campaign.
Absolutely. And the other thing … for people who are aware of pop culture within India, we named on the walls each of the models who sat for the photography.
The woman who portrays the goddess Lakshmi, she’s visually famous, as is the woman who portrays the goddess Saraswati. The woman who portrays Saraswati is a well-known newscaster, so it’s like looking at the goddess of wisdom and learning, but also seeing a Katie Couric or another famous newscaster in that role.
And seeing Lakshmi, you also see a Bollywood actress some may recognize. And even if you can’t recognize the face behind the monkey God Hanuman, when you read his name, you realize he’s a really famous bodybuilder in India — like Arnold Schwarzenegger-famous bodybuilder.
So, there’s this layering of the 21st century over this thousands-of-years-old history of Hinduism.
What does that say about the Hindu religion and its imagery that these complex deities can be viewed so many different ways by so many different people?
I think part of what that says is that Hinduism is a practice that is additive — it adds things as opposed to taking stuff away. So, I think that’s one really crucial part to it. But I think the other crucial part is that all of these deities are functional in the environment within South Asia.
One of the most amazing things that happened during the [COVID-19] pandemic is that when everybody was in lockdown … global pollution was dramatically reduced.
And what that meant in India is that you could be in New Delhi in the capitol and be able to actually see the Himalayan Mountains, which had not been visible that way since the Industrial Revolution because of air pollution. That meant at one time you used to be able to see the mountains where the gods lived.
The physicality of the country, the rivers, the mountains, the oceans, all connect to where those gods live in the same way that the Greek Pantheon connects to the physicality of Greece and Mount Olympus.
So, I think that while we lost that connection in many ways when Christianity overtook Greece for the Greek Orthodox Church, that was something that was never lost within South Asia.
When you look at Shiva — whose matted locks hold back the river waters of the Ganges River and who lives on Mount Kailash — you realize that Mount Kailash is an actual mountain that people worship as the home of Shiva … and whose glaciers are the ones that produce the river waters that flood into the Ganges River.
What do you hope people will take away from seeing these very old representations of Hindu gods and the new representations Sharma created with her photography?
One is that Hinduism goes beyond just India. … And the other is that it’s incredibly old, but it’s also incredibly new and it’s incredibly adaptive. If I had just two takeaways, those would be major wins.
What do you hope the exhibition says about immigration and tolerance towards people of different beliefs?
Well, one of the things Indians are very proud to say is that India is the world’s largest democracy. Because, of course, they have billions of people. Far larger as a population than the United States.
One of the reasons that the Indians are excited about being the world’s largest democracy — and why Hinduism often is this additive religion — is that there are lessons to be learned about mutual respect of very different stories.
Earlier you were saying, “Oh, it’s so interesting that these deities can have multiple stories that can be contradictory or they can be overlapping.” And that’s what the philosophy really allows for is it allows for multiple timelines.
I don’t know if you’re a Marvel Universe fan, but I think the term “multiverse” is really perfect for understanding aspects of Hinduism. I hope we’re living in the multiverse where people want to have mutual respect and understanding.
Because we all learn from each other and are better for it, as opposed to [an existence] where we’re trying to narrow our worlds. The world is huge, and knowledge should be expansive. It should not be contractive.
Manjari Sharma
Because you didn’t use Photoshop or digital manipulation when you created these photos, you had to rely on craftspeople to create props and makeup effects. Was that something that you knew from the start?
It was a little bit of an evolution. I definitely had a very clear ideas. I sketched out these very rudimentary illustrations, there were digital sketches, and I had my color palette and how I wanted a very central figure. I wanted to fill in the details of each of their sets. And so, I had that plan in place. … And then my first one was Mahalakshmi, that’s the goddess of wealth that has the gold coins falling from her hands.
And I went on to the mission of trying to create her. … I had my model chosen, but I started out with these rental props. I rented the elephants and I rented a large lotus ceramic piece. I tried to have rented jewelry and and see if I could make it come alive at a fraction of a cost.
Mumbai, in India, has a big market for mythology props, and objects. … [Hindu stories] are very alive in India. And so, they have theatrical reenactments of these stories or of these deities. Put it this way, there’s entire markets dedicated to props and objects that could be purchased or rented in order to recreate some of these stories.
So, I started out with something that was a little bit more rental-oriented, and then I realized that I didn’t want that approach. It wasn’t a mockery, it wasn’t an approximation. … I really wanted it to look like every object in the set really belonged to a world that belonged to the subject. Everything was centered around the human subject.
So that’s when I started to get them custom constructed, and that was expensive, but that was the way that it looked correct. It looked like it fit. … You couldn’t really get the right scale of an object unless you really designed its placement and built it, so it was in proper perspective with the object in the foreground. It seemed like custom constructing it, while complicated, was also the most direct way to get the desired results.
Why was it important not to digitally manipulate the images?
Well, I mean, I’m a visual artist, and I’m thrilled to see a block of fiber turn into clouds. Just alone, the grounds of the beauty of the craft coming to life is thrilling. I didn’t consider myself a Photoshop artist, so that was not a route I was interested in taking.
Also, there’s a love for the element of performance, of how these materials, when they layer on each other, become a conversation in itself. Human layered with fiber, layered with painting, layered with ceramic, layered with pieces of wood and objects floating and suspended with fishing line. I mean, it was an experience in itself.
The final photograph was where it all stopped, but the lead up to it was this process of metamorphosis where you just saw something come out of nothing. But it was slowly built by many, many hands. It felt almost ironic, if not very meta, that here’s a bunch of humans, flawed humans, coming together to make up this image of perfection that would be the image of a god, which, again, is played by a very flawed human being. The flaws of it were the most interesting part to me.
What would you like people to take away from these photographs who grew up Hindu? And what would you like for people to take away who know nothing about Hinduism?
For those who are already aware of it, I would say a mythology is like this Banyan tree. It’s so wide and it’s so vast, and it’s so convoluted and interconnected. And the connective tissue between these deities is fascinating. There’s so much to learn, and it’s kind of endless.
I do not claim to be an expert, but it … continues to be a thrill to discover more and more and more [about Hinduism]. So, I hope that this maybe invites them to continue their exploration of it. Because, it’s been fun for me to do that, especially living far away from a culture that [I] took for granted but was always immersed in some kind of a mythological conversation. …
And then, for those who don’t know anything about it, I would say, “Different is cool, different is interesting. “Different is why I left everything I knew and traveled to another part of the world. What continues to challenge me as an artist is doing something different, learning something different. I hope this [exhibition] invites them to discover a culture that has great significance and meaning.
And then, also, there are the parallels — the parallels of stories, regardless of what mythology you are approaching. There’s so much commonality between Hanuman and the Wookiee [from Star Wars], for example. I’m personally very interested in science fiction. It’s my favorite place to go where I feel like mythology and science live together, and it creates this fictional reality that is a hybrid of the past and the future. I think there’s a lot of clues embedded in all kinds of cultures, so I welcome people to look for clues in this one.
$12-$22 or free for Bexar County residents 4-7 p.m. Tuesdays and 10 a.m.-noon Sundays, through July 6, San Antonio Museum of Art, 200 W. Jones Ave., (210) 978-8100, samuseum.org.
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This article appears in Mar 19 – Apr 1, 2025.
