For Sri Lankan American artist Shyama Golden, self portraits are a visual language. Through them, she is able to unveil herself beyond conventional demographic and geographic identity markers.

…a rare occasion that I covet as an attempt to invigorate a discussion about design being unleashed from its identity as fine art’s scorned, lesser-than relative.

A long-term resident of Delhi, Paul is nonetheless able to distance herself from the city to the degree required to record its dynamic, dense, and complex vibrations. Over the past four years, as the invisible germs of Covid-19 have mingled with the polluted air, she has turned her attention to the breathing of its citizens.

Each dissertation’s value as a primary document is not merely preserved, as it already has been on the university cupboard or shelves; Reliable Copy’s republications enhance the originals’ meaning, turning them into a bridge between two points in time and within an artist’s life alike.

for the Curatorial Intensive South Asia 2023, supported by Khoj International Artists’ Association and Goethe-Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi, self-published.

Sri Lankan photographer Ashini Nanayakkara’s works explore the links between architecture and photography. While travelling in Tasmania in 2017, she encountered miles of vast and desolate architecture, inspiring her to photograph urban landscapes…

As one of the most popular and accessible mediums, how did cinema as a mode of mass cultural production respond to this socio-political context during and after the war in the country?

In Tennekoon’s experimental style—mixing claymation, stop motion and 2D animation—the colourful, highly expressive characters speak to a variety of audiences. The narration in each film is retained in the protagonist’s voice, giving them the agency to convey their own stories…

The picturesque hills, greenery, flora, meadows, and beaches as photographed in the desk calendars, which were produced by the national tourism department, are all accompanied by the phrase “It is sunny today in South Africa.”

We see the story and the home, first from the perspective of the artist, an engaged observer and listener, and then we see the story and the home from the perspective of the storyteller, the owner of the memory…

A musician with a Tamil background experiences the war as someone who primarily works with Sinhala lyrics and cinema, often funded by the government with a focus on Sinhala nationalist ideas in a newly postcolonial Sri Lanka.

Every Monday Nori would send Ved a letter and every Friday she would receive his response. Nori fills the ‘absences’ between sending or receiving correspondence with photographs of Ved at home and school during their occasional in-person visits, with watercolour and pencil drawings, and her interpretations of anecdotes sent by Ved. His voice is amplified by her voice in this effort of collaboration.

A review of Families 'Not' in the List by Hema Shironi

Though she belongs to a movement of young artists exploring recent upheavals in Sri Lanka, Hema Shironi’s works also draw upon her experience as a mixed-identity artist.

Bonikka exemplifies Shenuka’s childlike curiosity and nostalgia. Apart from the act of revisiting a story she learned during her ballet lessons as a child, she honed her craft of digital drawing with an open mind.

This false “safety” women are promised within the “haven” of purity and sanctity that is the domestic sphere is captured by the motif of the refrigerator.

Elements of nature appear and disappear with tender movement, juxtaposed with shots of Malik performing elaborate hand gestures, crouching and sitting. In one still, water moves softly underneath Malik's body while the artist's face is turned away, and we see an empty shell on her back.

While rituals for each unknown, displaced, dead, and/or disappeared civilian’s “afterlife” would have been the norm according to their cultures, Machado’s photographs portray the absence of such rituals and simultaneously immortalise those that were affected by the massacre through a different "ritual" of photographic documentation…

Against vivid backgrounds of red, pink and grey lie almost life-sized figures frozen in time, often in the midst of movement. Machado explains her practice of making photograms of humans as a daring process that encourages her to experiment without a camera in sight…

In The Crucible (1953), Arthur Miller's semi-fictionalised dramatisation of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93, Tituba, a native American slave woman, is accused of using herbs in the forest to make a “charm” equated to “blood” to perform witchcraft, conjure the dead, and force love…

The landscape of arts and culture in Sri Lanka is facing a boost after three years of difficulties caused by the pandemic and a political and economic crisis of a scale never seen before. I have been hearing the words “revival”, “exciting”, “courageous”, “thought-provoking”, and even “too much to do, too much to see” from many…

While several generations of Sri Lankans experienced the war, the manner in which each did so was vastly different. The education system in Sri Lanka often erases contemporary histories of the country from the curriculum, neglecting events that occurred after independence from the British in 1948…

Sri Lankan photographer Ashini Nanayakkara’s works explore the links between architecture and photography. While travelling in Tasmania in 2017, she encountered miles of vast and desolate architecture, inspiring her to photograph urban landscapes…

“Serendib” is one of the more notable terms of Arabic and Persian origin that was used to refer to Sri Lanka during pre-colonial times. It was soon replaced by “Ceylon,” which dates back to the Arabic term “Saheelan” that was used during colonial times…

Devi’s experience and my experience with the garment are different––yet we both resonate with the garment’s symbolism of the patriarchal power structures that govern our sociocultural existence as women in South Asia.

The meanings of interior and exterior spaces are personal to Inam and go beyond their walls to reveal larger existential questions she asks of herself, related to love, death, and madness.

Held at Exhibit320, New Delhi, India

Held at the Harold Peiris Art Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka

This series of vignettes started as a challenge to myself: what if I were to recollect skies from my life so far? Would I remember anything? Over the past three decades?

I often wonder why dust ‘settles’. Or why we expect it to ‘settle’. Is it because we forget? Is it because we stop caring? Is it because we are forced to move on by socio-political circumstances shaped by our leaders? This ‘settling’ unsettles me…

A birthplace of the country’s Modernist movement, the rural estate of a queer icon, incubators for young artists, and other art spaces to pay attention to.