Sarath Kumarasiri

In a museum display case, the kind usually kept for relics and royal possessions, sits a pair of shoes moulded in terracotta, and a pair of trousers, and a shirt, each fired hard into permanence. Sarath Kumarasiri made them from the clothes of friends killed in Sri Lanka’s civil war, and set them where a country keeps the belongings it has chosen to honour, so that unnamed victims might enter a space memory usually reserves for the political and cultural elite. That gesture, quiet and exact, held the centre of his work.

He was born in 1968 and trained as a sculptor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Kelaniya, with further study in sculpture and archaeology, the second discipline never far from the first: he kept a lasting interest in the past, worked on mural-conservation projects, and served for a time as Director of the National Replica School under the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Clay was his material and remembrance his subject, and terracotta, which lends a fragile object permanence, carried the meaning he wanted it to hold.

He belonged to the ’90s Trend, the movement that remade Sri Lankan art through that decade. He took part in one of the earliest Sri Lankan performance-art interventions in 1992, a piece that addressed hidden state violence, and in 1999 he was among the artists behind the ‘No Order’ group and its manifesto, which set out the political and personal terms of the new art. He was a founding member of the Theertha Collective, the artists’ collective formed in Colombo in 2000 that gave that generation a home, and he was widely regarded as its foremost sculptor of violence and memory. His series ‘No Glory’ was first shown in 1998, and its concerns stayed with him.

The work travelled. In 2006 he held a residency at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, where the project he called ‘Memories of Personal Suffering’ grew to 28 terracotta sculptures and 32 drawings; there he widened his subject beyond Sri Lanka to the uniforms of the former Japanese Imperial Army, the possessions of those killed at Hiroshima, and objects burnt in the wartime air raids on Fukuoka. His sculptures were later gathered into the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka’s 2019 exhibition ‘One Hundred Thousand Small Tales’, and shown abroad at ‘Don’t Measure Me’ at the Historisk Museum in Oslo.

Sarath died in 2025, and that June the Millennium Art Contemporary at Athurugiriya mounted a memorial exhibition under the old title ‘No Glory’, gathering the terracotta and the drawings once more. The shoes and the shirts remain what they were made to be: ordinary belongings raised to the standing of relics, a claim that the lives lost in the war deserved the same keeping a nation gives its treasures.