Firi Rahman

A pen moves across the paper in thousands of small black marks, building the fur of an animal whose kind may not outlast the century. Firi Rahman draws in fine ink, patiently and by hand, and the creatures he renders in dense monochrome are ones thinning toward extinction. To understand why a self-taught draughtsman should spend such labour on the disappearing, you have to walk into Slave Island, the old quarter of Colombo where he was born in 1990 and lives still, a place under threat of vanishing in its own way.

He is of Malay descent, from one of the communities layered into Slave Island across centuries of colonial Colombo, a densely woven neighbourhood of many faiths and origins pressed together in the middle of the capital. He took a foundation in art and design through City and Guilds at Manchester College in the United Kingdom in 2012, then taught himself the exacting draughtsmanship for which he became known, entering the Colombo scene with his first solo exhibition, ‘Unconventional Beauty’, at the Saskia Fernando Gallery in 2015.

Two subjects run through the work, and they turn out to be one. The animals came first: after researching extinction and the loss of species in Sri Lanka, he drew endangered creatures so that each carried its own story in the marks that made it, a body of work seen in his exhibition ‘Prediction Extinction’. Then came the neighbourhood. In ‘Enclosed’, shown at the Saskia Fernando Gallery in 2020, he turned to a part-real, part-imagined cartography of Slave Island, mapping a home he could feel being written out. The endangered animal and the threatened quarter are drawn with the same ink and the same patience, because both are studies of something valued and at risk.

That concern became collective as well as drawn. Firi co-founded ‘We Are From Here’, a project of research and archival documentation in Slave Island that records the life of a tightly connected community and maps, in its own account, the pressure of gentrification driven by state and corporate interests. His work has shown at the Colombo Art Biennale in 2016 and across editions of Colomboscope, at the Dhaka Art Summit and the India Art Fair, and he held a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2023; he is represented by the Saskia Fernando Gallery, and his drawings are held in private collections across several countries.

The pen returns to where it started. Firi gives the same close, unhurried attention to a vanishing animal and to a vanishing street, and the attention is itself the argument, a way of insisting that a thing be looked at properly before it is allowed to go. The draughtsman from Slave Island keeps drawing what the city is in a hurry to lose.