Sujeewa Kumari

A studio photograph of nineteenth-century Ceylon sits on the easel, its subjects arranged long ago for a colonial audience, and Sujeewa Kumari pushes a needle through it. She prints these images onto canvas and treats the printed surface as a beginning: she draws into it, paints over it, and stitches through it, until the authority of the archival photograph gives way to something handled, contested and remade. The settled colonial view of the island becomes, under her hand, a question rather than a document, and the question she keeps asking is who was left without a say in how they were seen.

She was born in 1971 in Bandarawela, in the hill country, and studied at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies at the University of Kelaniya in Colombo before continuing abroad, taking her master’s at the Dutch Art Institute in the Netherlands in 2004. That formation moved her decisively from painting alone into new media, video and mixed media on paper and canvas, and the range is now the whole of her practice: she is as likely to work in the moving image as on a worked surface, and the two share a single preoccupation with how memory is stored and how it can be reopened.

Her subject is what she has called de-realised memory, the images drawn from history, tradition and daily life that harden into accepted fact. Working through the nineteenth-century photographs of Sri Lanka, she reopens colonial-era imagery to ask how people were seen, and how women in particular were placed, once the colony gave way to the nation, keeping a wry, sceptical eye on the way an inherited local world was made to answer to a borrowed global one. The needle matters here as more than technique: the labour of stitching, long coded as women’s work, is turned back on the very archive that once looked past such lives.

The work has been shown in Sri Lanka and well beyond it. She was included in ‘Between Kismet and Karma: South Asian Women Artists Respond to Conflict’ at Leeds Art Gallery in 2010, a project convened by Shisha with the University of Leeds; earlier she had appeared in ‘Artful Resistance: Crisis and Creativity in Sri Lanka’ at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna in 2008, and her practice has since featured in the Colombo Art Biennale and at the Dhaka Art Summit, keeping her within the South Asian contemporary circuit rather than at its edge.

What she offers is a patient act of correction. The island was photographed, catalogued and put away; Sujeewa opens the drawer, sets the pictures back on the easel, and works into them with paint and thread until the people held inside the frame are given back some part of the say they were denied.