Pradeep Chandrasiri

Thirteen broken hands rest on thirteen betel leaves turned face down, in the manner of a funeral house, with charcoal and oil lamps set among them so that the whole room reads as a place of mourning. The hands are casts of a single hand, taken many times over in common terracotta, the clay of ordinary use, then fractured and laid across the floor. They are Pradeep Chandrasiri’s own right hand, and by his own account the violence they record is his own, for he was interrogated and tortured as a young man; the installation turns that private wound into a memorial for concealed violence held in common. The work known as ‘Broken Hands’ is the piece that fixed his place in Sri Lankan art, and it began in his own body.

To understand how a man arrives at such a room, you go back to the years that shaped his generation. He was born in 1968 in Kandy and came of age through the insurgency and state reprisals of 1987 to 1989, the period that shadows so much of his generation’s work. He took his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies of the University of Kelaniya in 1997 and a postgraduate diploma in archaeology from the same university in 2001, and he belongs to the artists first gathered under the ‘90s Trend, the movement that met the country’s civil war and social crisis with performance and installation rather than the easel alone. In 2000 he became a founding and executive member of the Theertha International Artists’ Collective, the institutional home of much of that generation.

His practice runs across installation, sculpture, object art, painting, performance and drawing, and reaches into the theatre, where he has worked on set and production design; the through-line holds steady, autobiography turned outward, the body as the pivot of the work, personal memory used to hold open a public reckoning with loss. He has described the broken hands themselves as a reconciliation, an attempt to make sense of the conflict he lived through, which places the piece closer to a rite than to a statement.

That standing is documented well beyond Colombo. In 2003 he received the Commonwealth Arts and Crafts Award, which took him to a visiting-artist programme at the University of Wollongong in Australia; his work was shown in ‘Portraits of Intervention: Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka’ at Aicon in New York in 2017 and in ‘Don’t Measure Me’ at the Historisk Museum in Oslo, and his role as a Theertha founder places him at the centre of the scholarship on the island’s contemporary turn.

What stays with a viewer is the modesty of the means against the weight of the subject: everyday clay, betel leaves, the shape of a single hand, gathered into a room that asks to be entered quietly. Pradeep built an art of memory out of the most ordinary materials to hand, and out of his own body, and it is by that art that the years he survived are kept from going silent.