About
Memory, Material, and Making
Zarah Mangera is a UK-based artist and photographer whose practice explores memory, belonging, diasporic identity, and the instability of the photographic image. Working across alternative photographic processes, installation, drawing, and found materials, her work questions what an image can hold, what it fails to preserve, and how objects carry histories beyond their original place.
Her practice often begins with photographs, materials, and objects gathered between India and the UK. Some are inherited, some are found, and some have travelled with her across places. Doors, wood, brick, domestic surfaces, tools, and fragments become more than supports for images; they become active participants within the work. Each surface holds its own history, damage, residue, and resistance, shaping how the image appears, breaks down, or disappears.
Through processes of transfer, repetition, sanding, layering, drawing, and re-making, Mangera allows images and objects to become unstable. Not all surfaces fully accept the information placed onto them. Details are lost, fragments remain, and the viewer is left questioning what they are really seeing: an image, an object, a trace, or a memory partially reproduced. This uncertainty reflects the nature of memory itself: incomplete, shifting, and shaped by both presence and absence.
Her work is rooted in themes of inheritance, displacement, and cultural memory. Materials and images are acquired, transported, transformed, and re-presented, carrying with them traces of where they have come from and where they now exist.
Rather than offering a fixed narrative, her practice holds space for ambiguity. The work occupies a third space between image and object, past and present, here and elsewhere. Meaning emerges through process, through the act of making, and through the viewer’s encounter with materials that appear familiar, broken, historical, and unresolved.
Approach
Mangera’s approach is led by material experimentation and process. Photographs are transferred, layered, sanded, repeated, and interrupted by the surfaces they meet. Found and inherited materials are not treated as passive supports. Their weight, texture, age, damage, and previous use become central to the meaning of the work. Through acquiring, transforming, and manipulating objects, Mangera considers how personal histories can be carried, fragmented, and re-formed through making.
Focus
Her work focuses on memory, diasporic identity, belonging, inheritance, displacement, and the relationship between image and object. Across photography, drawing, and found materials, the practice considers how histories are carried through surfaces, how objects retain residue, and how meaning can remain open, uncertain, and continually in flux.
Selected Group Exhibitions
2020 - Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, Open: The People’s Exhibition, Leicester
2021 - Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, Open: The People’s Exhibition, Leicester
2024 - Fine Art Gallery, Soft Play, Loughborough
2024 - Performance Space, Archivals, Loughborough
2025 - Hesse Office, Altar, Loughborough
2025 - Fine Art Gallery, Annual Interdisciplinary Exhibition, Loughborough
Awards and Honours
2026 – Edward Sharp Prize, Winner, Loughborough University Fine Art Degree Show
2026 – Modern Painters, New Decorators Award, Shortlisted, Loughborough University Fine Art Degree Show
Education:
2023 – 2026
BA Fine Art, Loughborough University
2021 – 2023
A-levels: Graphic Communication (A*), Photography (A), Fine Art (B)
2016 – 2021
Secondary Education / GCSEs: Fine Art (Grade 9), alongside additional GCSE qualifications
Available for exhibitions, collaborations, commissions, and selected print and purchase enquiries.