Muvindu Binoy

At a screen in Colombo, Muvindu Binoy lifts a photograph out of colonial Ceylon, one of the stiff studio portraits that once fixed the island for the eyes of its foreign viewers, and sets it down in a field of pastel colour beside an object pulled from the internet of his own decade. He cuts, he frames, he squares the whole thing to the proportions of a phone screen, until an inherited past and a borrowed present sit inside one picture and answer to him. To see what he is doing, you have to start from the position he works from: a man who came to his country’s deepest wound at second hand, and made that distance his subject.

He was born in 1989, into the generation that grew up after the worst of the civil war rather than inside it. He is self-taught, an independent filmmaker as much as an image-maker, and his practice positions him as an observer of a trauma he did not live at first hand, present in the country’s air without being written on his own body. That stance, watchful rather than confessional, runs through everything he makes.

His medium is digital collage, and his argument is carried in how the images are joined. He gathers popular-culture objects and the nostalgic photographs of colonial Ceylon and holds them together inside pastel geometric shapes that borrow the look of digital icons; the square format is an open citation of Instagram, the trimmed image-world through which his generation learned to see. Around these compositions he sets the questions that occupy him: gender, agency, and the collision between inherited tradition and the emancipated standards of the digital age. He has played on the letter Y, both as Generation Y and as a question, to name the doubt his work keeps reopening.

The practice has carried him well beyond Colombo. He showed at the Colombo Art Biennale in 2016, and at the Jawahar Kala Kendra in India in 2019; he held a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2021; and in 2022 his work entered ‘Pop South Asia: Artistic Explorations in the Popular’ at the Sharjah Art Foundation, a regional survey of how the popular image has been claimed by artists across the subcontinent. He is shown through The Artling and the Saskia Fernando Gallery, and is counted among the leading figures of the younger Sri Lankan generation.

For all the polish of the surfaces, the work stays fixed on a single unease: what it means to inherit a country’s images, its colonial past and its recent violence alike, at the remove of a screen. The observer at the desk keeps assembling the pieces others left him, and in the assembling makes them, at last, his own.