RAMAA SHARMA ANNOUNCED AS ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE FOR SOUTH ASIAN HERITAGE MONTH
We’re excited to welcome Ramaa Sharma as our selected artist-in-residence for South Asian Heritage Month 2025. Ramaa, a multidisciplinary artist with roots in South Asia and strong ties to East London, will be undertaking a two-week residency exploring themes of heritage, memory, and identity.
During her residency in August, she’ll be responding to our Time Capsule project, a major initiative that invites both artists and community members to reflect on what should be remembered, preserved, and passed on to future generations.
The Time Capsule is more than a sealed box of memories. It’s a platform for dialogue: What is “heritage” in the context of the past, present, and future? What stories define Newham today, and what might speak to the people who will live here in 81 years?
Through workshops, creative sessions, and community consultation, we are gathering voices, visions, and materials that reflect the spirit of this moment, and Ramaa’s contribution will be a key part of this process.
Exploring South Asian Heritage in Context
During her residency, Ramaa will draw from her South Asian heritage and her lived experience to explore overlooked legacies, historical absences, and the tension between remembrance and erasure.
We’re thrilled to see how Ramaa will respond to the residency and the Time Capsule brief, and we’re even more excited for the ways her work will engage the local community in thinking about heritage in its broadest sense, personal, cultural, and civic.
This residency is part of our wider programme for South Asian Heritage Month.
Ramaa will be holding a workshop “What will we remember 100 years from now?” on the 6th August 19:00–20:45 READ MORE HERE
About Ramaa
Ramaa Sharma is a mixed-media artist and Founder of the interdisciplinary consultancy How We Do This, which offers creative and relational approaches to leadership in the age of AI.
Her artistic practice is a spiritual one. It responds to the tension of living authentically in a society that struggles to hold difference and complexity, and where people are often reduced to simplified labels and data points in systems and technologies.
Through mixed and multimedia processes, Ramaa explores her own layered and contrasting identities: older new mum, Panjabi mother to a mixed-race child, British and South Asian, a middle-class Londoner with working-class roots, Hindu and agnostic, artist and journalist, coach and founder.
Exploring the ambiguity, conflict, and creativity of in-between spaces has become an essential practice and a process that is not without its challenges, not least when excavating oppressive internalised narratives.
Hence, her process is intuitive and investigative using collage, painting, digital drawing, text, and documentary forms, believing the message dictates the medium.
Ramaa’s work invites dialogue between the personal and the political, the dominant and the invisible. By embracing both analogue and digital methods, each piece becomes a meditation on identity, freedom, and the complexity of becoming.
On the upcoming residency, Ramaa says:
“I’m looking forward to exploring what heritage means to us, how it’s felt, remembered, and what we want to honour. I’m especially curious about what emerges when participants encounter AI-generated images that claim to represent the borough and its histories. What feels true? What’s missing? And what do we hope people 100 years from now will still remember? In a place like East London, which is being reimagined as the Silicon Valley of the capital, these questions feel especially urgent.”