Looking Beyond the Conflict: What's driving contemporary artists from Sri Lanka?

Meanwhile, at the ongoing Art Mumbai fair at Mahalaxmi Racecourse, another art ist is showing the fraught past of Sri Lanka through a different medium. The softness of fabric serves as a background for some tough realities as Hema Shironi presents a landscape of conflict. “In the tactility of the green mesh, often used in construction to shield the promise of a new beginning, she frames an image of a cookie-cutter house ‘presented’ to families for the home that was taken away—an attempt at reconciliation in the aftermath of war," states Rad hika Hettiarachchi in a curatorial essay. These works were earlier showcased in September in Delhi as part of the twin exhibitions from the island nation, Homes Wrapped in Cloth, Borders Raised in Flags and After Aphantasias by Shrine Empire.

Contemporary artistic voices from Sri Lanka are making their presence felt across South Asia through gallery exhibitions, institutional shows and participation in fairs. Their expression, centred around a lived experience of conflict, has universal appeal, especially at a time when different parts of the world are witnessing some form of violence.

INTERCONNECTED HISTORIES

Artist Anoli Perera, for instance, has, in her extensive practice, situated personal family histories within specific historical moments through sculptures and installations featuring text, objects, used cloth and paper. She looks at the female body as a vessel of memory, belonging and connects it with her mother. By using fabric, Perera harks back to her childhood memories of stitching with her mother, who maintained a sewing book. The way cloth changes and modifies over time is a meta phor for the changes that a body goes through in its lifetime. Today, she is joined by Pakkiyarajah, Kingsley Gunatillake, Pala Pothupitye, Jagath Weerasinghe, Chathuri Nissansala, Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah and Thilini Jinadasa in showcasing contemporary perspectives from the island nation on a global stage.

The Sri Lankan practices are now firmly enmeshed within the broader art ecosystem in South Asia. Anahita Taneja, director, Shrine Empire, attributes this to interconnected histories within the region, which allow viewers from different countries to resonate with the works. “Internationally, art from South Asia is getting a wider platform. Important museums are interested in contemporary art from the region. We want to bridge the gap by getting emerging artists from Sri Lanka to the fore as well," she adds.

In such a scenario, curators need to be watchful of the dangers of presenting a unidimensional narrative wherein literal interpretations of conflict are showcased, and artists from Sri Lanka end up getting stereotyped. Even as the number of shows of artists—both solo and group—in major art centres across the country increase, “the ground reality, which is in flux, may not always be represented by the commercial visibility of artists," says Natasha Ginwala, artistic director, Colomboscope, an interdisciplinary arts festival and creative learning platform founded in Sri Lanka in 2013.

To counter this, she has been working at the grassroots with artists who have witnessed ethnic violence, social marginalisation and displacement in Sri Lanka, particularly in the north and east. The dialogues are nuanced, drawing from communal stories and personal experiences and relate to subjects such as environmental justice, plantation histories, labour in upcountry tea estates, migration and linguistic plurality. “We have also hosted diaspora artists to share stories of return and belonging and not just displacement," adds Ginwala, who recently presented projects and dialogues in Delhi in collaboration with the Gujral Foundation. The showcase, featuring artists such as Chathuri Nissansala, Hema Shironi, Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah, Prasad Hettiarachchi, Rajni Perera, and more, addressed many subjects such as indigenous sovereignty, feminist fantasy and ecological ruination.

This event was also a prelude to Colomboscope’s ninth edition, Rhythm Alliances, which will be held across sites in Colombo from 21–31 January 2026. Ginwala is trying to bring in a certain complexity by centering the body as an agent of memory and looking at different ways of engaging with architecture, music and storytelling in the city. “We are tuning in to rhythm to capture a certain cultural continuity within Sri Lanka, and thinking of vocabularies that pass on through song, ritual and traditional instruments. For instance, different drumming practices are prevalent in the north, east and south. The island is somehow connected through the vibrations of the drum, which allows us to think of kinship in a different way," she adds.

WORKING ACROSS DISCIPLINES

For Feroze Gujral, founder and director, Gujral Foundation, such presentations are critical to her role as a patron to ensure that these urgent voices—often complex and challenging—are not sidelined. By supporting Sri Lankan contemporary practices on global platforms, she hopes to sustain a dialogue about memory, justice, and a responsibility to the environments and communities we inherit. Exhibitions and presentations are acknowledging the physical and psychological rupture in the artists’ lives when the ancestral land is reclassified as a military zone or as a ruin. Home then becomes something spectral, a memory one keeps returning to.

In Gujral’s view, artists respond by re-mapping geographies through sculpture, photography, installation and sound—insisting that memory has its own sovereignty even when territory is contested or erased. When Sri Lankan artists address displacement, they are also speaking of ecological devastation, resource conflict, and climate vulnerability. “These are not separate issues; they are interconnected consequences of war and its aftermath. Creating space for artists to work alongside historians, environmental researchers, and community archivists allows art to move from reflection into proposition—imagining models of shared recovery and collective futures," she adds. The materiality of the works is quite significant. It doesn’t just allude to what is visible to the eye, but contains several metaphors within. Pakkiyarajah, for instance, transforms everyday materials to allude to a certain fragility.

"At this moment, many parts of the world are embroiled in war and conflict. As a result, my own memories of violence keep repeating. I choose black for solidar ity, inviting the audience to think about the past and future together. I evoke visions of charred ecologies and humanity through the contrast of black and white. The mycelium-inspired works talk about connected memories and how everyone can heal together," Pakkiyarajah says.

Pradeep Thalawatta, 46, too creates linkages between the external environ ment and the interiority of the self through his practice. Born in Rathnapura and based in Colombo, he works with found objects to create layers of memories in his work. His ongoing show, Go Home is Within Me, at the Saskia Fernando Gallery, Sri Lanka, is inspired by the aspirations and political awakening of the youth in his country as seen in the protests following the economic struggles of 2022. Thalawatta, who is represented in India by Latitude 28, uses sandpaper, photo prints and tar from the sites of the protest to forge connections between collective aspira tions and personal dreams. In I Still Locked II, “a reminder of the peak of the economic recession, (he) rein vents the gas cylinders into collection boxes for the gods. Borrowed from Jaffna’s street vernacular, the installation explores the relationship between com modities, faith and survival with satire," states the curatorial note.

EVERYDAY OBJECTS

By using found objects, Thalawatta creates collaborative works with the young citizenry of Sri Lanka and those who came before him. “Every material has its own temperament and history. Sandpaper, for instance, can be used for both erasing and giving shape. Through my work, I hope to create a new dialogue between image and material," he says. Another prominent voice, Kingsley Gunatillake, who has shown his work at Blueprint12 in Delhi, also uses found objects to create sculptural forms of charred and wounded books. Through this, he relives the burning of the Jaffna Library in 1981. His works become an embodiment of lived history and shared memory, thus acting as “witness to and language of" the post-war landscape.

Textile has also emerged as a material of choice. By using this symbol of the domestic sphere, artists draw an arc from the personal to the political. T. Vinoja, 34, an art educator in Batticaloa, showed her work at A Moving Cloak in Terrain at Experimenter, Colaba, in September. She collects stories and fabrics from different parts of the island, and creates tapestries of a narrative of collective loss.

Like Pakkiyarajah, Vinoja feels that memories never go away. “The land itself contains memory. When states and nations create borders, they divide land. This begs questions of ownership and domination. A divided landscape is always wounded; as a result people who are dis placed from it also have wounded histo ries," she says. When Vinoja sees the scars of displace ment on people’s bodies, she feels com pelled to express those through fabric, which is like a second skin on the body. “When I add lines, marks or dots, I am con necting the dots between the homeland and the new land that people have to con sider home. The dots are like an aerial per spective of this journey. The colour of each thread too has meaning—through them, I create broken landscapes of the country and the soul," says Vinoja.

MOMENTS OF JOY

Artists also reflect on moments of joy— small and big—in the post-war scenario. Siva Kajendran, who will have a solo show next year at Delhi’s Gallery Pristine Contemporary, has one such practice. Having lost his family in the civil war, he feels that citizens like him have lost the ability to cherish everyday things because of the fear of violence. Kajendran tries to derive joy from daily moments—playing with his nephew, going fishing, cooking shrimp for dinner or simply sitting under a coconut tree. His paintings articulate that sense of acceptance of the everyday.

Thilini Jinadasa, who is showing her works in What Memory Built in Colour at the same gallery, also uses colour to convey emotion and memory. Inspired by the gradations of orange, blue, green and brown that fill the landscape of Sri Lanka, she reflects on the natural elements around her that make life worth living. According to gallerist Arjun Sawhney, Jinadasa’s usage of oil on canvas gives her works the feel of a watercolour. Though trained in design, she found her calling in painting, with each work acting as a journey of self discovery.