Jasmine Nilani Joseph

Jasmine Nilani Joseph draws the landscape the war left behind, one fine ink line at a time. She works chiefly in pen and ink, in drawings of great density and patience, and has carried the same eye into sculpture, installation, mixed media and animation. Her subject is the North of Sri Lanka after some thirty years of armed conflict: the abandoned house, the boundary fence, the barricade and the coil of barbed wire, the coconut and Palmyra standing over settlement land that has been emptied, returned to, and drawn again.

She was born in 1990 in Jaffna, and her childhood ran with the conflict. When the fighting reached the peninsula her family was displaced south to Vavuniya, where they lived in a camp and in the resettlement housing that followed, and that experience of the lost and provisional home has stayed the ground of her work. She read for a degree in fine art at the University of Jaffna, graduating in 2015, and has continued to live and work in Sri Lanka.

Her method begins on the ground. She researches the places she draws, gathering the geographic detail of displaced homes and the way a security structure comes to stand for the militarisation around it, and works from that record and from communal memory rather than from invention. The drawings hold the evidence flatly and let it accumulate, so that a fence rendered line by line becomes a document of who may pass and who may not.

Her work has travelled well beyond the North. She is represented by the Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi, which gave her the solo exhibitions ‘Mobile Studio’ in 2020 and ‘Who Decides the Distance?’ in 2023, and she has shown at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, the Dhaka Art Summit, Colomboscope in Colombo, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka, the tenth Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane and the Gropius Bau in Berlin. In 2022 she won the DBF Asia Art Future Award, and her drawing is among the work gathered in Phaidon’s survey ‘Vitamin D3’. She belongs to the generation now carrying Sri Lankan art onto the wider stage, and she does it with the quietest of means, a pen and the patience to fill a sheet.

Sources

1. Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, collection record for The absence of the next door and the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial, 2022.
2. Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, artist record and the exhibitions of 2020 and 2023.