Conversation with Gayan Prageeth

Spoke with Sri Lankan article Gayan Prageeth about his latest exhibition, Eyes Only - featuring a body of work with a narrative focused on the developments of politics and corruption in Sri Lanka post-war. https://soundcloud.com/user-635616592-684253190/open-studio-podcast Please note the podcast is in Sinhala. Download the English transcript here. See original post on the Saskia Fernando Gallery …

The Defence Secretary and the President

Sri Lanka is led by a man who has, by his admission, two faces. In a more democratic avatar is Gotabaya Rajapaksa the President. Here, the individual in question is presented as smart, suave and sage. Before he spoke, his suit bespoke, as rapper Kanye put it in song, captures man and mission. An older …

The end of free and fair elections

The proposed 20th amendment will be the death of free and fair elections in Sri Lanka. The study of political communications and digital propaganda for over a decade leaves no room for doubt on what will follow if (when?) the 20th Amendment, in its current form, is passed in Parliament. Worse, if the proposed amendment …

‘The Tide Will Turn’ by Shahidul Alam: A cri de cœur of photography & prose

Alam’s power as a photographer, bearing witness to so much around him, is a belief that we – Asians, people of colour, brown folk, those from the Global South or in Hans Rosling’s framing, those from Tier 2 or 3 countries – are the best placed and able to tell our own stories. Alam started …

9 April, Dunedin, New Zealand

I spoke to my father’s sarong on the morning of the 9th. It was my birthday, the first after Thaththa died. Growing up, my sister and I never celebrated our birthdays with parties. We never went to any either. I cannot recall what my sister got for hers, but I almost always got a book …

Memories of my father

Late October last year, I was woken up early in the morning by my mother in a state of panic. I had returned to Sri Lanka a few days before to pursue my doctoral fieldwork. Responding to my mother’s cries, I found my father unconscious on the floor. The significant brain trauma and internal haemorrhaging …

Finis

Almost exactly five years after starting this column, I will end it before it is ended. The non-publication of the column a week into the new Presidency was a reminder that the space enjoyed by writers to critique political power from January 2015, is now under threat. One must be empathetic with publishers and Editors. …

Hidden campaigns

I can’t see Basil Rajapaksa. Social media doesn’t record his actions, feature accounts by or content on him. He isn’t the subject of memes. He doesn’t appear in any of the ego-centric, selfie laden photo albums or posts of the larger more social media savvy family. On Facebook, he was featured just a handful of …

Priorities

It’s the conversation you never have about the location of files and status of finances. The passwords to accounts. The method to the madness that is otherwise an indecipherable filing system, where everything is stored, but nothing can be found. It’s the conversation you don’t know how to start, and to begin having is an …

Murals as masks

If a key political actor or set of allied actors wanted to secure more power, all the while appearing not to be interested in it, how could one go about it? Lessons of 2018 suggest that unconstitutional means don’t secure public support, or at the very least, risk generating swathes of support for political opponents …