Sujith Rathnayake

When the occupation of Galle Face green swelled through 2022, Sujith Rathnayake made his work inside it, and carried the result into a gallery under a plain title: ‘Arbudhaya Saha Aragalaya’, or Crisis and Struggle. For a painter who had spent years picturing a society dulled by consumption, the uprising was the moment his subject stopped being a diagnosis and became an event he was standing within.

He was born in 1971 in Ranna, in the deep south of Sri Lanka, and took his BFA at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies at the University of Kelaniya. His practice settled early into installation and assemblage, mixed media that gathered paintings, photographs and objects into whole environments, and its recurring theme was the anxiety of people living in a consumption-oriented society. In 2000 he held a residency at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, where he built an installation called ‘Wounds for Sale’, a title that already carried his suspicion of a world willing to put everything, including its own injuries, on the market.

The Galle Face work answered that long preoccupation from the other side. Made during the occupation of the green and in the months after, and shown at the Lionel Wendt Art Gallery in Colombo in February 2023 under the organisation of the protest site’s own art committee, the pieces reach across painting, assemblage, installation and mixed media into what its presenters called a visual art attack. The critique of a sedated public gave way to a record of that same public awake and in the street, and the work belongs to the movement it came from as much as to the artist who made it.

His path to that moment ran through the earlier institutions of the Colombo scene. He showed at the National Art Gallery in Colombo and at the 9th Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka, both in 1999, before the Fukuoka residency in 2000; the events of 2022 gave his standing concerns their sharpest occasion. The consistency across two decades is the point: the same suspicion of a society that consumes its way past its own condition, tested first in the museum and then on the ground.

‘Wounds for Sale’ and ‘Crisis and Struggle’ stand at the two ends of one argument: that a society can be sold its own numbness, and that it can also, on a stretch of green beside the sea, refuse to keep buying it.