Thisath Thoradeniya

A wooden marionette dressed as a Victorian jester stands at the centre of the room, strung and jointed, waiting to be moved, and around it the drawings and the small kinetic sculptures turn life into a stage on which this figure is made to dance, fall and dream to order. Thisath Thoradeniya called the exhibition The Way You Like It, and its unease sits in that title: the jester performs for us, on our terms, and knows all the while that the performance cannot be escaped.

The show, at Saskia Fernando Gallery in Colombo from 11 June to 11 July 2026, was Thisath’s first solo presentation in a decade, and it drew a long practice to a point. He belongs to the generation that emerged after the 1990s, came out of Kandy, and took his early training at the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Art before settling in Colombo as a full-time professional artist working across charcoal drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and object art. His subject has stayed close to the machinery of contemporary life: the pull of the electronic apparatus, and the ways a person is handled, prompted and manipulated by forces just off the edge of the frame.

That interest surfaced early in the charcoal work. When his drawings travelled to New York in 2017 for Portraits of Intervention: Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka, the Aicon Gallery survey curated by Bansie Vasvani, they were read for the way their irony pointed at human manipulation, the figure caught mid-gesture and not quite in command of the gesture. The Way You Like It gives that idea its fullest body. Across three series, Dancing on the Edge, Dreams, Dreams, Dreams and The Great Fall, the jester carries the whole arc, poised on a lip of disaster, chasing an aspiration, then coming down; the careful study of body language and psychology turns the puppet into a mirror.

The record around the work is international and steady. Thisath showed at the Colombo Art Biennale in 2014, under its Making History theme, and at the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka in 2008, and he has taken up artist residencies and workshops in Bangladesh, Mauritius and Colombia, each one feeding the same enquiry into how people are moved and by what. The kinetic sculptures make the question literal: mechanisms that must be set going, figures that hold their pose only as long as something drives them.

Return to the marionette. It stands at the centre because it is the argument in one object, a made thing that looks most alive when a hand is on its strings and most human when it is left, briefly, to fall. Thisath has spent his practice watching the strings rather than the dance, and asking, without quite letting the audience off the hook, who is holding them.