Indian Ocean Craft Triennale The Indian Ocean Craft Triennial (IOTA) is an international arts event held every three years in Western Australia that celebrates and explores contemporary craft across the Indian Ocean rim with Carola Akindele-Obe, Executive Director and Jude van de Merwe, Curatorial Chair & International Liaison. Sharmila is part of a curatorium with Kallol Datta (India), Miranda Johnson (Australia), Catriona Maddocks (Malaysia), Zali Morgan (Australia), Ignatia Nilu (Indonesia), Nim Niomsyn (Thailand), Shaleen Wadhwana (India). Established as the first and only event of its kind in the region IOTA is designed to build cultural connections between countries linked by the Indian Ocean, such as Australia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, South Africa, and others. Each edition of the triennial typically features three main components: a major international exhibition presenting leading and emerging artists, a scholarly conference that brings together academics, practitioners, and curators to reflect on the value and future of craft, and a state-wide festival of satellite exhibitions, workshops, and public programs.

Notes for Tomorrow is an exhibition conceived by ICI that takes the events of 2020 as a jumping-off point for a radical reassessment of our present. In 2020, ICI turned to our worldwide network of curators and asked them to share one artwork they believe is vital to be seen today. The resulting exhibition features artworks selected by thirty curators from around the globe that take on many of the issues that have moved to the fore in the pandemic's aftermath. In this necessary moment of cultural transition, each work is a source of inspiration from the recent past towards new futures. Sharmila nominated Amrita Hepi, Soothsayer Serenades for this work. You can read more here.

Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology is a traveling exhibition that considers kinship, healing, and restorative interventions as artistic practices and strategies to foster a deeper consciousness of our interconnectedness with the earth. Actions for the Earth is a resource for current times, reminding us that we are connected within a constellation of living networks, inseparable from the earth. The exhibition emphasizes learning, care, and intimacy, inviting its publics to participate in instruction-based meditation and deep listening among other actions. During the tour, projects will generate site-specific exchanges between the artists, the environment, and local communities, growing and changing over time.

Artists: Ackroyd and Harvey, Lhola Amira, Arahmaiani, Sayan Chanda, Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser), lololol, Ana Mendieta, Zarina Muhammad, Patrina Mununggurr, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Tabita Rezaire, Mithu Sen, Cecilia Vicuña, Katie West, and Zheng Bo.

Actions for Water is an iterative exhibition designed to expand over time through co-curatorial partnerships following founding partner University of Sydney, Tin Sheds Gallery. In 2026 the exhibition will be presented with La Trobe Art Institute, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of creative practitioners from diverse geographies to explore water as both a vital ecology and a site of speculative possibility. In response to escalating privatization, pollution, and degradation, artists reclaim water as a shared commons that is imbued with cultural memory, collective histories, and communal stewardship. Rather than offering immediate answers, the artworks presented attend to complexity, endurance, and the slow unfolding of time.

Artists: Imani Jacqueline Brown, Tomoko Hayashi, Mei Swan Lim, Daniel Jan Martin, Zarina Muhhamad, Khvay Samnang, Sao Sreymao, Urbonas Studio, underFOOT Collective.

The Language of Orchids An iterative project, the Language of Orchids is a collection of photographs and text that expands from a family album of Singapore in the 50s- 70s. The first chapter of Language of Orchids was catalysed with Mok Zining whose collection of poetry, The Orchid Folios reimagines the orchid as a living, breathing document of history: a history that enmeshes the personal, colonial, linguistic, and biotechnological with the Vanda Miss Joaquim, the symbol of Singapore’s postcolonial hybridity. The lecture/talk is in the programme of the Perth Writers Festival and in partnership with the Centre for Stories.