Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah
"Charred landscape that swallows hemo-", 2023
Acrylic on paper
46 7/16 x 47 ¾ x 0.01 inches (118 x 120 x 0.05 cm)
Courtesy of the Artist

Selected by Hoor Al Qasimi

Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah (b. 1989, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka) completed his BFA in Art & Design at the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka in 2014, and completed his MFA in Studio Art (Fulbrighter) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 2022, and received the South Asia Studies Fellowship at Cornell University (NY) in 2018. He is a multimedia artist whose practice ranges from installations to performance-based soundscapes, videos, sculptures, and drawings. Pushpakanthan was featured in Thinking Historically in the Present at the 15th Sharjah Biennial 2023, conceived by the late Okwui Enwezor and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi. Recent exhibitions include: We Will See (two-person show) at Experimenter - Colaba, Mumbai in 2024; Way of the Forest at the Colomboscope 2024, Straddling Ocean and Sky (solo show) at the Brief Histories gallery in New York in 2023, and Titen: Embodied Knowledge, Shifting Grounds at the 17th Biennale Jogja.

As an ‘artivist’ for a decade, he seeks to be a witness to the Sri Lankan civil war and lift marginalized voices through his art. His interdisciplinary practices reflect the painful and often silenced legacies of the thirty-year civil war while also tackling globalization’s dark sides. Often intentionally unsettling, the artist’s work draws from histories of violence and the legacy of trauma that some people carry with them. In attending to silenced pasts, he aims to engage in a process of healing by creating space for the memories some people share from this period.