We are pleased to announce that Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) has acquired Shelter for Life and Starving Flag, two artworks by Hema Shironi to be included in their permanent collection. Both artworks were featured at the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane (2024).
"The artist considers the politicisation of language and the travesties of inequality and injustice to be subjects requiring deep and necessary interrogation. Shelter For Life (2020) takes the form of a fabric newspaper arranged around minutely stitched cartouches of text. Created over several months, it features 30 accounts of people from different regions of Sri Lanka describing experiences of suffering and hardship. Significantly, the work features the three languages commonly spoken in Sri Lanka - Sinhala, Tamil and English - that are seldom co-published in the press."
"Starving Flag (2022) reconstructs the Buddhist flag, combining fields of colour, and the moral principles they represent, with embroidered objects. Each motif is central to a recent crisis or period of civil unrest: blue gas bottles that people rely on for cooking, which are notoriously unsafe and unavailable; yellow barriers that create new borders and divisions during times of conflict; red buses representing overused and underfunded public transport; fear-inducing white vans associated with terrifying wartime kidnappings; and orange fuel cans that sparked protests during the recent economic crisis."
- Tarun Nagesh, 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane, 2024.
Hema Shironi (b. 1991, Kandy) is a multidisciplinary artist. Her wide-ranging artistic practice combines embroidery, bricolage, and installation to inquire concepts of cultural identity. Shironi’s work has been featured at the 13th Taipei Biennial: Small World, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (2024), Delhi Contemporary Art Week, New Delhi (2024), Art Mumbai, Mumbai (2024).
