Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah

Two palmyra palms stand over his father’s grave in the east of Sri Lanka, planted when Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah was four years old and the man was buried beneath them. They are, in the artist’s account, witnesses: still standing, still marking a loss that the wider country has spent decades learning to forget. Much of his work is an effort to keep such losses visible, and to do it without turning grief into spectacle.

He was born in Batticaloa in 1989, in the east, and came of age inside Sri Lanka’s civil war, the conflict that ran from 1983 to 2009 and fell hardest on the Tamil north and east. By his own account he was held briefly in a detention camp while still at school. He went on to a BFA at the University of Jaffna, in the northern city the war had scarred most, and then, as a Fulbright scholar, to an MFA in studio art at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

He works across drawing, painting, video, sculpture, installation and performance, unwilling, as he has said, to settle into one medium. The subject that binds them is disappearance: the people taken and never returned, the landscapes burned and paved over, the histories a post-war state would rather leave buried. In ‘The Disappearance of Disappearances’ he addresses the erasure of the missing directly, and in later work he turns to charred ground and the mycelium threading through it, treating a wounded land as something that might, slowly, knit itself back together. He has been deliberate about how he shows suffering, saying he does not want to present the bodies of victims as objects for others to appreciate.

He is represented by Experimenter, one of South Asia’s more serious contemporary galleries, which has shown him in exhibitions including ‘No Race, No Colour’ in 2025; his 2023 solo ‘Straddling Ocean and Sky’ was held at Brief Histories gallery in New York, and his work featured in the Sharjah Biennial the same year. He held a South Asia Studies Fellowship at Cornell University in 2018 and a visiting fellowship at the University of Essex in 2020, and his work has entered collections including the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell and the Sharjah Art Foundation. He teaches as a senior lecturer at the Swami Vipulananda Institute of Aesthetic Studies, Eastern University, in Sri Lanka.

For all the institutions now attached to his name, the work keeps returning to the ground it began on: a family plot in the east, two palm trees, a father remembered by a son who was too young to remember him well. Pushpakanthan makes art out of what a country is asked to leave unspoken, and holds, quietly, that it should be spoken.