Priyanthi Anusha

Priyanthi Anusha turned from the canvas to the body. She began as a painter and has moved into installation and performance, work that asks a single persistent question: how the standard of beauty set from a masculine point of view is experienced by the woman held to it, and what the gendered life looks like from the inside rather than the outside. Her performances put that question in the first person, as something lived rather than argued.

She has taught art since 2001, and in two government schools since 2011, carrying the practice into the classroom alongside the gallery. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Arts, and has read for a master’s in art history at the Post Graduate Institute of Archaeology in Colombo. A member-artist of the Theertha International Artists’ Collective and active at the Mullegama Art Centre, she works within Theertha’s women’s circles, the Women’s Artists’ Colloquium and Fire Flies, and showed both in the colloquium’s 2010 exhibition and in a solo showing at the Theertha Red Dot Gallery in Pitakotte the same year. She appears in Pala, the 2023 documentary on the artist Pala Pothupitiye, among the voices who tell his story.