Roof Series
Exhibition: Many roads through paradise
04 October -02 November 2024
Barefoot Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Migration has been a constant epicentre of my being. Throughout my journey, due to financial circumstances, constant disjunctions arose from not belonging, leading to a tale of a nomadic being. Each memory, inheritance, and narrative assimilated created a presence of nostalgia within my identity. Mapping a collage embodiment of the organic presence of migration and fragmented identities fused onto the cocoon surfaces of the papers. Oral narratives and memories transcend into a tangible presence on each piece, moving further away from an autobiographical focus into perceiving a universal occurrence of a being oscillating between temporalities of territories. Drawing from mythological literary scripts such as Geetha Saram (a brief of the holy script Bhagavath Geetha), Vaikunda Ammanai (based on the Mahabharat mythological script, recited during funeral gatherings), and Ramayanam (a mythological text), it lays the foundations to understand the recurring cosmic presence of not belonging or the nomadic existentiality. Their assertions within the contextual premise lead to paradoxes with the presence and the past of migration and nomadic existence.
“The lives of gods, kings, and other characters in epic and literary stories are no exception, as they convey the experiences of individuals who have been touched by a succession of displacements and changing lifestyles, all of which are, however, unstable, in epic and literary stories. They've had comparable experiences to ours. Life events and stories like this are turned into epic and literary works. We can examine our lives and reassure ourselves via them without getting tired of calculating our misfortunes. I aim to include the lyrics of epic and literary stories directly into the artwork, putting into words and visuals what is spoken about the unsettled existence and sequence of displacements of individuals who are viewed as heroes or characters in the stories, as well as their concerns.”
Due to the constant migrations that disrupted any sense of permanence, I feel a profound gap between myself and my environment. This distance separates me from the landscapes and surroundings I once inhabited. In response, I reshape the memories of the landscapes I’ve missed, the houses I’ve lived in, and the experiences tied to them, uniting them all under the symbolic roof of a single home.
Fragile presence and acceptance of the nomadic lifestyle of constant migration can be seen throughout the present circumstances. They could’ve led from the sociopolitical to the Capitalocene, yet people are constantly adapting and succumbing to these situations and environments. My works, oeuvres on layering, each entail disjunctions of presence, memory, identity, and belonging into a cosmic presence of thresholds in the cycle of existence.