Godwin Constantine

Godwin Constantine trained first to save the body and then made it his medium. He qualified in medicine, graduating from the University of Jaffna in 1991, and he has gone on reading widely across sociology, philosophy, neurobiology and poetry; but the discipline he is known for is performance art, in which his own body, marked and covered and held under strain, becomes the thing an audience is asked to read.

He was born in Kandy in 1964 and went to school first in the central hills, then in the north after his family was displaced by anti-Tamil riots, a childhood cut across by the same communal violence that would run through the country for the rest of the century. He studied art from a young age and trained at the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts in Colombo, the school that formed much of Sri Lanka’s politically engaged art of the 1990s. He is a founding member of the Theertha Collective, the Colombo artists’ body formed in 2000, and serves as its chairman; in 2015 he began the Theertha Performance Platform, running annual workshops that brought performance artists from abroad to work alongside Sri Lankans.

The written record of Sri Lankan performance art tends to begin with him. In 1999, at a solo exhibition, he staged what is widely cited as the first performance artwork made by a Sri Lankan artist within a visual-art context, a piece the performance-art literature describes as a tribute to Rajini Thiranagama, the human-rights scholar and co-author of ‘The Broken Palmyra’ who was killed in Jaffna in 1989. From there his work settled on a single question, the relation between power and subordination, and on identity and camouflage as the means by which power hides itself and is enforced.

His performances, and the drawings, paintings and videos that accompany them, have been shown at the Colombo Art Biennale in 2016, at the Dhaka Live Art Biennial and in South Korea in 2019. He is counted among the senior figures of performance art in Sri Lanka.

What he offers is uncomfortable by design: a physician who puts his own body where an argument about power can be made on it, and who has spent a career holding that art in Sri Lanka can carry political weight without flinching. The instrument he trained to heal is the one he uses to make the wound legible.