The Artist Encounters event was a series of dialogues among participating artists of Colomboscope 2022 and cultural organizers of Language is Migrant. This session invited artists Areez Katki, Hema Shironi, T.Vinoja, and Omer Wasim to engage in dialogues moderated by curator, Colomboscope 2022, Anushka Rajendran to elaborate on their artistic processes, material research, and infrastructures of their work.

Artist Areez Katki from Aotearoa, New Zealand spoke of the musings behind his work shown at Colomboscope 2022. Growing up in Howick, a small suburb in East Auckland, where his Zoroastrian family settled after immigrating from the Middle East back in 2002, Katki’s use of text and textile narrates his identity as a Parsi-born former priest and a queer migrant body and contemplates the intense proximity to the domesticity of the inability to cross over to a home that lies by another shore. His work at Colomboscope 2022 depicts the various craft processes such as fabrication, patterning, and bead weaving.

Living between Kilinochchi and Batticaloa, T.Vinoja’s work explores the experiences of oppressed figures who are side-lined even within minor historiographies, memory keeping, and commemoration.  Her work ‘Differently Able’ and ‘Widows’ convey experiences of loss, abandonment, and shattered realities as she attempts to convey stories of post-war struggles onto her canvas. Her textile art, canvases, and installations use meticulously placed dots, cloth patches, burns, and lines to draft a common experience of the civil war through the evidence borne in disabled bodies and the afterlives of widows and orphans. At the session, T. Vinoja shares that this work is deeply personal, having lived through the height of the civil war herself. “I understand the struggles of those whose stories I tell through these canvases, I’ve been there myself. Working with the type of fabrics, incorporating detailed stitching, and connecting the two; I am able to show this trauma. The canvas for me is yet another skin.”

Artist Hema Shironi also uses fabric and stitching as a medium of sharing personal experiences. Her body of work for Colomboscope 2022 explores the experiences of internal displacement and home as a state of flux. Born in Matale, then moving from the mountains to Kilinochchi in the Northern Province and travelling for her studies and work in Jaffna, Shironi’s work embarks on a journey of building a temporary sense of place through relationships with neighbours and the challenges faced by relocated families during the recent lockdowns. She recomposes architectural spaces from private memories onto surfaces of fabric, paper volumes, and metals and uses stitching on the material as an homage to her maternal links to her mother and grandmother skilled at tailoring. “Working with textile and thread, I am attempting to explore the idea of a ‘house’.  As a child, we moved around a lot and I’m still searching for a ‘location’ and through my work, I am starting to investigate about myself and find what it really means to have a home”.

Elaborating on his work and his projects, Karachi-based artist Omer Wasim returned to Sri Lanka for a second visit on a month-long residency. His project ‘Spectral Remains’ for Colomboscope creates sites of remembrance in dialogue with its own memory of ethnic violence in Sri Lanka. Wasim’s ethos of creating works that a living, transforming, and ephemeral translates in this project where flower bed installations attune to meandering processes of recollection and the limits of representation. “I was very interested in materiality and returning to the ground to look for what has remained. My work explores the land, development, and moments of resistance.”

Pix by Pradeep Dilrukshana