"aquarium gazing thru a james turrell installation" (2024) Painting

maansi jain (b. munich, germany) is an artist living and working between NYC, Berlin and New Delhi. Her practice engages photography as a material surface, transforming analog images into sculptural forms that interrogate memory, displacement, and spatial perception. Through processes of warping, layering, and reconfiguring light-sensitive media, she expands the photograph beyond documentation into objecthood. Alongside her sculptural work, jain maintains a rigorous works-on-paper practice, exploring architectural grids, temporal mapping, abstraction and surrealist figurations as systems for organizing lived experience. Her performances draw on feminist and South Asian modernist histories, reactivating figures such as Amrita Sher-Gil and Kamala Das through embodied painting and text. She studied photography at the Sorbonne and semiotics at New York University. Most recently, jain’s work has been presented at Contemporary Fine Arts (Berlin/Basel), Serendipity Arts Festival in collaboration with Raqs Media Collective (Goa), and India Art Fair in partnership with Gallery Ske, among others. Her work is held in private collections across Europe, India, and North America.