Muhanned Cader

On a panel no bigger than a book lies a single horizontal line, sea below it and sky above, the plainest view of the island a painter could choose. Muhanned Cader chose it, and then he set about taking it apart. Across small panels, folded accordion books and cut-paper collage he reduces the Sri Lankan coast to its barest components, a band of sea, a strip of land, a weather of light, and sets those parts against one another until the familiar view stops looking given and starts looking made. The question underneath the picture is the one that has held him for a career: who drew that line, and where, and by what right.

He was born in Colombo in 1966 and belongs to the generation art history now calls the ’90s Trend, the artists who came of age watching the civil war reshape the country from 1983 onward. His formation carried him abroad early: he took a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994, then returned to work from Sri Lanka. He has taught at the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts in Colombo and lectured at the Ramanathan Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Jaffna, a northern posting that carries weight in a practice so concerned with how the island is mapped and claimed.

The work is small in scale and long in reach. Muhanned breaks the coastal landscape down and pares it back, the sea most of all, until the picture becomes a study in edges: where water meets sky, and where the drawn horizon of a colonial chart meets the lived coastline beneath it. Read that way, a view of the water turns quietly political, carrying post-colonial questions of possession and control through a subject as apparently innocent as the sea. The accordion books stretch the same thought across time, a landscape unfolded panel by panel rather than taken in at a glance.

His standing outside Sri Lanka rests on a steady record of named shows. He is represented by Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai, where he held the solo exhibition ‘Island in the Sky’ from January to February 2024 and showed in the group presentation ‘Horizons’ with Lubna Chowdhary and Seher Shah in 2025. Talwar Gallery in New York and New Delhi has given him a run of solos: ‘Jungle Tide’ in New York across 2014 and 2015, ‘Island’ in New Delhi in 2016, and ‘I See Sea’ in New York across 2019 and 2020. His biennale record takes in the second Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India across 2014 and 2015, the Singapore Biennale, the Lahore Biennale, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Asia Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, and his work has entered the Burger Collection in Hong Kong and the Devi Art Foundation in New Delhi.

He now divides his life between Colombo and Oxford, a distance that seems to feed the work rather than thin it. Come back to that small panel and its single line. The island stays the subject and the sea stays the place he keeps testing: a horizon small enough to hold in the hand, and unsettled enough to argue with.