Chandraguptha Thenuwara

A camouflaged oil barrel stands at a Colombo checkpoint, painted in the same dun and green as the sandbags and the barrier beside it, and the people filing past it have long since stopped seeing it at all. That habit of not-seeing is the thing Chandraguptha Thenuwara set out to break. He took the barrel, the most ordinary object in a city at war, and lifted it out of the street and into the gallery, so that the machinery citizens were taught to walk past would stand in front of them and be looked at. He gave the method a name, Barrelism, and the name held because the object held: militarisation had a shape, and he had found it.

He was born in Galle in 1960 and trained across two very different schools. He took a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, University of Kelaniya, between 1978 and 1981, then a Master of Fine Arts in painting at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow, where he studied from 1985 to 1992. He later turned back towards the archive of his own country’s past, completing an MPhil at the Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology at the University of Kelaniya in 2006. In 1993 he founded the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts, an independent art school in Colombo, and he is a professor at the University of the Visual and Performing Arts; his teaching has always sat alongside a practice that doubles as public argument.

The barrel proved to be a beginning rather than a fixed motif. Chandraguptha distinguishes three phases in the work: Barrelism from 1997, Neo-Barrelism from around 2007, then Post-Barrelism, each answering to a different stage of the conflict and its aftermath, and each spanning painting, sculpture and installation. His subject widened with the country’s fears. The white van, the vehicle Sri Lankans came to associate with enforced disappearance, entered the work in drawing series such as ‘This is not a White Van’, and his later pieces carry the same scrutiny into the peacetime he found no cleaner than the war: corruption, impunity, the quiet resettling of power. The instinct is constant, a refusal to let the ordinary object of state force pass unquestioned.

His most sustained gesture is a calendar rather than a canvas. Since 1997 he has staged a self-curated memorial exhibition every 23 July to mark Black July, the anti-Tamil violence of 1983 that opened the war, an annual act of public remembrance he has kept without a break for more than two decades. Few artists anywhere have bound a practice so deliberately to a single date of national mourning.

Abroad, he is represented by Baik Art in Los Angeles and his work has travelled widely. In October 2022 he showed at Frieze London, presented alongside Muhanned Cader in a pairing that drew on Sri Lanka’s beauty and its bereavement, and he has lectured and exhibited internationally on Barrelism and its offshoots. Within Sri Lanka he has been one of the defining figures of the contemporary scene, an artist in whom formal invention and civic conscience have never come apart.

Return to that checkpoint barrel, the object nobody was meant to notice. Chandraguptha made it impossible to ignore, and then made it a fixture of the calendar, so that once a year the country is asked to look again. The barrel remains his: plain, ugly, unforgettable, made to carry the memory a nation would rather set down.