The black line drawings in Thenuwara’s Covert series present intertwining leitmotifs such as lotus buds, bodies, barbed wire, thorns, stupas, lion tails, weapons, and vehicles, which the artist employs in his rhetoric against conflict. Covert considers the way collective violence puts pressure on the aesthetic field, as visual culture is co-opted into militaristic iconography. But while the series works to reveal such strategies, it also strives to undermine them: to appropriate and reinvent such symbolism in protest against its weaponization and the profound violence that accompanies it. Begun just before the 2022 Aragalaya protests, Covert is also deeply committed to the imaginative potential of contemporary art to picture political possibilities in alliance with wider social movements.