served to you with a dash of lime

Muvindu Binoy, Hashan Cooray, Kumkum Fernando, Arjuna Gunarathne, Kavishwara Jayasekara, Mayun Kaluthantri, Mahesha Kariyapperuma, Sangeeth Madurawala, Murugiah, Anupa Perera, Gayan Prageeth, Firi Rahman, Mika Tennekoon, Pradeep Thalawatta

Curated by Mariyam Begum and Sulakshi Ratnayake

Served to you with a dash of lime is a provocation – to acknowledge the messy contradictions of our world with joy and good humour. Borne from an observation of weighty critical discourse in art, this exhibition ventures into the idea of play and laughter as valid and often vital tools of engagement. The intent is to bring together work from Sri Lanka and its diaspora that takes an off-the-cuff approach to negotiate contemporary realities, functioning not as an escape but as a porous entry point into contentious conversations. Here you encounter a different kind of criticality – one that is laced with levity.

Leaning into a self aware humor that entertains derision, Gayan Prageeth and Sangeeth Madurawala offer razor sharp observations of society. Delivered with an acidic punch, they charm the viewer with a devious intellect and cautious sarcasm. Gayan Prageeth celebrates our obsessions. Visualizing a mannequin in an outrageously ornate homecoming dress the artist notes our fascination with grand wedding celebrations and western traditions. The  work becomes a subversive celebration of expectations to surrender autonomy within the institutions of marriage –  reinforced in the present by rigid colonial expectations. A similar hyperbolic aesthetic is at play in Sangeeth Madurawala’s digital collages where the women appear pretty as a picture in their virtuous and virginal altars.  Tussle with sacred icons, homely relics, bombs and bullets they tease the burning question – what’s a little divine intervention in the explosive theatre of gender politics? 

Touting the line between satire and absurdity, Anupa Perera and Kavishwara Jayasekara hold a mirror to  the comedy of errors that define the contemporary moment. Jayasekara reinterprets motifs and themes in traditional mural paintings, fashioning our enchantment with nationalist histories into tools to comment on the island's shifting political landscape. Adapted with a sharp subtlety, the demons wielding sickles underscore the seductive potency of traditions to entice both the polity and authority which aspires for change. Evoking a plasticine quality through figurines of Jesus, his apostles, and posters depicting the devolution of  human species into barcodes, Anupa Perera makes a mockery of humans as ‘moral beings’.  Peppered with pop culture references, his commentary on disavowal and desensitization is made sharper by the overall toyish appearance.

Reality is suspended at a momentary bridge created by the frivolity and weightlessness the act of play offers, where grim realities can be exchanged for merry enjoyment.  Mayun Kaluthantri returns to the simple joy of clay—the subtle thrill of feeling it yielding beneath the hand—as an act of slowing down. In a world dizzy with labels and products,  hazy images of monobloc chairs and mosquito coils accompanied by light platitudes are transformed into tender relics of an effervescent childhood. Playing off the bright and catchy language of advertisements and billboards,  Hashan Cooray taps into the excitement and novelty it offers to comment on the enmeshment between consumerism and free will.  In his work a jigsaw puzzle that is more unresolved than solved becomes a quip on the products we consume and covet, defining how we choose to shape our identities. Mahesha Kariyapperuma takes the playing card for a spin mimicking the intellectual waltz that takes place in virtual spaces. The temperamental Joker acts as a proxy for the divided opinions on uncertain economic futures and aspirations.  

Flippant and feisty, the defiant imagination scoffs at solemnity – unbothered by the need to explain. In this paradigm, animals and birds become cheeky interlocutors in Firi Rahman’s imagination. They flip  narrative led by human vanity on its tail, claiming agency by becoming the very objects they covet. Emboldened by a grunge aesthetic, Muvindu Binoy mirrors the online over stimulation and fragmented attention spans.  The visual splinters from anime, memes and internet ‘brain rot’ captures a confused generation’s  attempt to make sense of a cultural ‘glitch’.

Alternate ways of experiencing the world can be realized through unhinged, unbridled imaginations. Spontaneity and a zeal for wicked fun become liberating forces , permitting the invention of a new lexicon and visual grammar to tell our stories. The sugary dreamscapes playfully lace with South Asian iconography in Murugiah’s work, twiddling between surreal escapes and celebration of hybrid textures of diasporic life. In imagining a swashbuckling sci-fi adventure, at once ancient and futuristic, Kumkum Fernando crafts narratives  that de-centers the colonial histories of the Global South. Blending remnants of the French colonial architecture with Hindu myths and folktales the artist takes a whimsical flight, where myth and memory traverse non-linear timelines to reimagine how postcolonial histories are constructed. 

Characterized by the bittersweet longing for places and people that contain joy, Pradeep Thalawatta and Mika Tennekoon reach out to tender memories in search of comforting respite. Thalawatta captures the fleeting moments in which skies vividly come alive. Working on cement bags collected from construction sites, the artist reclaims the sky from the multi-storied outcroppings, responding to the weight of solastalgia. Tennekoon, seeks the softness of inherited humour as a radical intervention in an age of crisis fatigue, and moral contradictions. Latin phrases used in naming plants and idiosyncratic sayings of a father work like spell work, becoming magical incantations. Illustrations on ledger paper intertwine with text, gesture, and botanical elements - both real and invented, challenge the seriousness of our times. Arjuna Gunarathne  fashions a parallel universe enriched with celebration and mirth, as he navigates a life as an immigrant in a foreign land. The candy-coloured hills the artist inhabits with his family become a sanctuary from disorientation where magic prevails in the ordinary and intimate company of loved ones. 

The sweet and sour collude in the exhibition through the works of fourteen artists who operate from the in-between, oscillating between inherited traumas and self determined joy, between the mythologised homeland and belonging elsewhere and between the heaviness of crisis and the lightness of play.  The act of disarming and delighting become modes for a spirited reimagination of existing structures, challenging prevailing hypocrisies, and conjuring alternate truths as they continue to resist the complexities of the here and now. With a tactical frivolity these artists arouse laughter of all kinds – a knowing snicker, a warm smile or a just good old belly laugh – reminding us of the potency of joy as both critical apparatus and healing salve.