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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. 

About the Artists:

Sharmistha Ray is the Estella Loomis McCandless Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University and a visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores the complexities of cultural inheritance and queer identity through abstraction in painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and electronic media. In Emergent Realities Ray will present a new body of work featuring animations and sound. Ray has presented work in major exhibitions across the U.S., India, Mexico, and Brazil, and is the co-founder of Hilma’s Ghost, a spiritualist feminist art collective focused on collaborative research, pedagogy, and community engagement.
 
Their work—both solo and collective—has been exhibited at institutions and galleries such as The Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Galería RGR, Mexico City, Mexico; The Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil; Secrist|Beach, Chicago, IL, and is featured in a major 2025 public art commission by MTA Arts & Design at Grand Central Station, New York, NY. A recipient of the Joan Mitchell MFA Grant, Montblanc Young Artist Award, and TED Fellowship, Ray has held residencies at the Wassaic Project and Fire Island Artist Residency, among others, and has taught at numerous institutions including Parsons School of Design and Rhode Island School of Design. 

Their work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Artnet, and Hyperallergic, and they currently serve on the Editorial Board of Feminist Art Practices and Research, a journal launched by Taylor & Francis in 2025. Ray holds a dual Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Master of Sciences in Theory, Criticism, and History of Art, Design, and Architecture from Pratt Institute and Bachelor of Arts degree from Williams College.

Arooj Aftab is a Grammy Award–winning composer, producer, and musician, celebrated for her deeply emotive and genre-defying music. Her critically acclaimed albums—Vulture Prince (2021), Love in Exile (2023), and Night Reign (2024)—have established her as one of the most distinctive and original voices in contemporary music.

Aftab’s practice blends minimalist structure with emotional complexity, drawing from a wide range of influences to create a unique sound that is distinctly her own. Her performances have been presented at major venues and festivals worldwide, including the Royal Albert Hall, Coachella, Glastonbury, Primavera, and Le Guess Who?, which she co-curated in 2023. She has been featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and  Later… with Jools Holland, and her work has been covered in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Pitchfork, and TIME.

Born in Saudi Arabia and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, Aftab moved to Boston to study jazz and composition at Berklee College of Music. In addition to her studio recordings and live performances, music from her albums have been featured in film, television, and interactive media, including the indie video game Backbone. She is a United States Artists Fellow and a recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Music.

Kinship is a new sound composition by Grammy-winning artist Arooj Aftab, created in collaboration with visual artist Sharmistha Ray for the exhibition Emergent Realities. The work reflects on how connection transforms—how things that begin together can drift, change form, and still remain linked through unseen frequencies of relation.

The composition moves like a pulse—steady yet mutable, expanding and contracting with quiet intensity. Layers of sound pass through one another like transmissions, drawn from a shared source yet subtly altered with each encounter. Familiar tones evolve through these exchanges, growing distant, unfamiliar, until they become strangers. Yet even in this distance, they remain bound by a quiet gravity—still in dialogue, still circling one another in new configurations.

Aftab approaches Kinship as a dialogue between relation and transformation. Rather than accompanying Ray’s imagery, the composition moves beside it, attuned to the same field but following its own rhythm. It listens to the process of becoming—to how emotion and energy echo through time, shifting shape while preserving traces of their origin.

At its heart, Kinship considers the persistence of connection—the ways beauty and recognition can live within transformation, and how, even as we shift beyond what we were, something essential still hums between us, like light traveling endlessly through the dark.

Sharmistha Ray: Emergent Realities is curated by Anastasia James and presented by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

Image: Sharmistha Ray, Still from Emergent Realities, 2025. Courtesy the artist.