Little Do I Care

Anushiya Sundaralingam
Chudamani Clowes
Dumiduni Illangasinghe
Fabienne Francotte
Hema Shironi
Inam Caffoor
Liz Fernando
Sachintha Nirmani
Shaanea Mendis
Shanika Wijesinghe
Tamarra Jayasundera

'Little Do I Care' speaks in registers of resistance. It is the kind that lives in the in-between: unhurried, understated, and quietly sublime. 

Masquerading as absence, and sometimes brilliance, it promenades in spaces denied to it. 

Coursing through oceanic waters, red, green, and yellow rice packets disperse like polyps in tropical currents, leaving a trail that echoes the influx of immigrants on western shores. Chudamani Clowes reclaims agency through a deliberate disavowal of orderliness and artistic conventions. Unravelling itself like an untamed landscape, Chudamani’s vibrant visual style offers a counterpoint to colonial imaginations.

Invisible threads of mycelia, potent with the possibility of sustaining and creating ecosystems anew, gently contest inherited architectures of control in Dumiduni Illangasinghe’s practice. Vermillion red, a colour synonymous with the feminine divine in the South Asian region, anchors Dumiduni’s reimagination of nature, culture and sisterhood as mushrooms spring to life.   

As measured distance becomes a protective sheath, it learns to carry contradictions. 

Confronting the complexities of urban society and its inherent structures, Inam Caffoor retreats into nature. Her work peels the discomforting truths of our social worlds in layers, as she traces a return to pre-urban landscapes, mapping the city as it once was, foregrounding the wilderness native to the island as a refuge.

Through a process akin to meditation, Shaanea Mendis quietens the dizzying clamour of cities and the dreary sense of isolation it brings. Working deliberately with watercolours, she contains fluid colour within organic, nature-inspired forms; her practice becomes an act of resistance, reclaiming time through stillness.

Anchored in tenderness, it meanders through dreams, desires, and harrowing memories. 

The weightlessness of light casts a tender glance in Liz Fernando's photo series. Photographing the interiors of rooms where lovers meet briefly, she captures a space that carries their traces. - in the soft imprint of intimacy on sheets, in dimly lit hallways, and in a gaze directed towards the ceiling. These are spaces that the world often meets with an unkind gaze; Liz's lens refuses that judgment. In its place, she offers warmth, asking us to look with the same gentleness that lingers in the room itself.

Sachintha Nirmani transforms granite such that it becomes imbued with softness. Meeting the resistance of the material with a gentleness that releases its once-molten form, she draws out from stone what stone is not expected to hold — vulnerability, yield, the memory of flux. Her sculptures embody resilience not as hardness, but as the capacity to remain tender under pressure.

Tenderness becomes an ointment to harrowing memories in Hema Shironi's practice. In her work, the artist returns to homes that witnessed loss. Full of feeling and recreated from a child’s perspective, they imitate marks made by children on walls. Reaching back into memories from childhood, Hema ‘redraws’ these houses with thread - as entities filled with life and warmth; having taken on the rhythm of its inhabitants, before they became mere shells.

It appears as inertia. It appears as motion. It appears as a refusal to surrender. 

Anushiya Sundarlingam’s practice is grounded in a deeply personal experience of leaving behind her homeland amidst the political instability in Sri Lanka. Like disembodied limbs writhing in pain, the braided hair is infused with life as it reaches back for the roots that once anchored it. The line, dominant in Anushiya’s work,  becomes a thread connecting the artist to her community and roots through which she retraces her steps back to her cultural homeland.

Resistance encoded in the body gives way to arrested motion. Carrying the weight of myriad emotions, the bodies in Fabienne Francotte's work activate inert spaces. Caught in an unstructured choreography, neither fully still nor surrendering to movement, teasing motion without conceding it. There is something wilfully unpredictable in this suspension, as though each body resists the legibility of gesture, refusing to resolve into meaning too easily.

Return becomes a wayfinder.  

As forms emerge, merge, and collapse into rocky formations, the living world of organisms and inorganic coalesce into one another in Shanika Wijesinghe’s speculative futures. Her work beckons us to return to nature, making the lines that separate the world of the human and the non-human blurry. 

Turning inward, Tamarra Jayasundera uses the body as a map to excavate ancestral knowledge and resist colonial hegemony. Drawing on over 14 years of practice and deep meditative experience, her work layers meditation notes, collective writing, and spontaneous experimentation to chart the psyche's hidden architecture. Through this, she challenges systems of control and spiritual capitalism, seeking clarity, recalibration, and a return to one's own instincts and integrity.

Bringing together eleven artists across diverse disciplines from Sri Lanka and its diaspora, the exhibition invites a slow reading, where it gradually discloses the visual language of resistance embedded in each work. The exhibition becomes a space to witness quiet acts of both method and material, through which artists renegotiate histories of control, colonial legacies, and the personal. Arriving at a moment when we are enveloped by uncertainty, the exhibition offers itself as an antidote. It cautiously balances an awareness of our present reality and outlines ways to reimagine it, resist it.

Visit the viewing room here