Sharmistha Ray: Entangled Portals

Spanning three windows of Rice University’s Fondren Library, Sharmistha Ray’s Entangled Portals is a vinyl installation that evokes the visual language of stained glass to explore communication transcending visible and invisible realms. While researching at the university, the artist encountered the Archives of the Impossible (AOTI), a rare collection of documents, recordings, and images related to UFO sightings, alien encounters, and unexplained aerial phenomena. Founded by religious studies scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal and housed at the Woodson Research Center in Fondren Library, AOTI preserves accounts of extraordinary experiences that expand the frontiers of knowledge.

The imagery in Entangled Portals investigates the recurring appearance of abstract symbols, geometric forms, and enigmatic diagrams found in the archive: sacred shapes, symbols, and mathematical patterns that appear across cultures, spiritual traditions, and historical epochs. The project also intersects with Ray’s longstanding interest in experiences of alienness and belonging. As a queer, nonbinary immigrant whose life has unfolded across multiple cultures and geographies, they are drawn to figures and narratives that exist at the edges of legibility. The alien, in this sense, becomes more than an extraterrestrial presence; emerging as a metaphor for inhabiting multiple worlds at once and for occupying identities that challenge fixed categories of selfhood, gender, nation, and history.

By illuminating these forms through colored light, Entangled Portals proposes that mathematics, geometry, and pattern are part of a universal language, one capable of traversing species, cultural dimensions, and worlds. The work imagines communication as an act of cosmic entanglement, inviting viewers to consider how our shared place within the universe might be expressed through symbols, light, and perception. Rather than treating difference as distance, this installation asks whether estrangement itself might be a form of connection, a way of recognizing ourselves within a larger cosmos populated by intelligences, histories, and possibilities beyond our own.

In partnership with the Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University. A performance by Jasmine Hearn and Natasha Manley was made possible through the generous support of Rice University’s Department of Religion, Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Department of Art History, and Fondren Library.