Experimenter presents No Race, No Colour, Sri Lankan artist Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah’s first solo exhibition in India and in the gallery.
‘Flowers amongst Ruination’ | Essay by Natasha Ginwala
Pan-African revolutionary leader and agronomist Amílcar Cabral’s critical humanism was established around an ethics of care for the soil, tracing coloniality’s roots in soil destruction and principles of extractivism—which in parallel perpetuates systemic violence and dehumanization of the colonized[i]. ‘To defend the land is to defend Man,’[ii] Cabral wrote in 1988, thereby centering the land as the first source to be protected and establishing a vital equation of coexistence for cultural, political and economic resistance to be sown and built for generations. It is his ecopolitical lessons that one recollects as ‘profound disturbances in the natural complex soil-life-climate’,[iii] which exacerbate through multiple wars, famine, and spiralling energy use in the proliferation of augmented intelligence within everyday life.
There are those who walk with their head turned to the sky, and there are those who move with attention to the ground beneath their feet. I imagine Batticaloa-based artist and educator Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah as the latter kind. The solo exhibition No Race, No Colour, at Experimenter – Ballygunge Place, Kolkata assembles new and commissioned works by the artist conceived over the past four years. He explores interdependence, organic communication, and regeneration within forest environments and mycelial networks (as Suzanne Simard has termed ‘the wood wide web’), while continuing a grounded study to retell regional stories through an environmental lens. In building material aesthetics premised around ‘soil-life-climate’ within a territory that has witnessed decades of Civil War, Pakkiyarajah has for long observed how conflict induces trauma across living ecologies.
Draughtsmanship has accompanied the artist since the commencement of his praxis, even as he transforms primal forms and compositions into haptic sculptures and animation works. The symbolism of flora and thorny botanicals transact with acts of suturing disfigured memory and lacunae of recent history in Sri Lanka. These are ripe images that refuse amnesia in a post-war landscape and planetary terrains while global conflict is becoming eerily normalized. The series of drawings Diary of wounded flowers (2024–25) and Untitled Landscape (2025), which includes thread work, carries a ‘below ground’ aesthetic as snapshots wherein non-human actors transact. The artist often treats his drawings as threshold spaces between daytime sites and nightmare; where the anthropos recedes into gestural camouflage—traversing the undergrowth of haunted memory.
Pakkiyarajah reflects, “There is no race, color, or creed in flowers. They accompany us on our journeys, serving as a silent witness in funerals, ceremonies, and rituals. They represent and remind us of our departed loved ones. Flowers never cause strife or devastation; instead, they quietly offer beauty and meaning as they bloom.” Other emblems that accompany the artist include the blood moon. This unique celestial phenomenon becomes a leitmotif, especially in his stop motion animation Straddling Ocean and Sky (2021–2022), first exhibited at Sharjah Biennial 15, and earlier drawing series. It is also a signifier of those who have been silenced and disappeared. The blood moon is seen in different sequences of the 4-minute animation ensemble across a matrix of water and sky. Fish and passing ships convey Sri Lanka’s civilizational legacy and colonial conquests being shaped in a foamy Indian Ocean. From charting imperial cartography to borderscapes, thousands of found images are overlaid with drawings to make time leaps and convey current social schisms. The artist connects the vector of coloniality with militarized violence and traps of liberal capitalism—delving from the island vantage to macro perspectives. The surrealism in these works is distinctive as it encircles creatures and the elements. For example, experiences of subjective intergenerational trauma are evoked through an immense dark sky and in other works, upright palmyra trees that have turned black. The artist conveys, “the sky is related to our belief in life after death and power.” The score for this animated short included a unique collaboration with folk and classical musicians from across the island, many of whom were producing such a composite track for the first time, where piano chords are heard with striking grooves of a local small drum (udekki), summoning an affective paradox of extinction and rebirth.
The sculpture and sonic installation Hidden Mycelium in a Wounded Land I (2023) commissioned for Colomboscope: Way of the Forest forays in a multifaceted acoustic tapestry through recordings made around Batticaloa of sung dedications and the beats of udekki invoking goddess Pattini, a deification of Kannagi worshipped by Tamil communities in Sri Lanka and Southern India as well as in Sinhalese ceremonies in many parts of the island. Sufi chants are sequenced with the gurgle of water bodies[iv]. Pakkiyarajah sensitively listens and amplifies multi-faith traditions of the lagoon of his home terrain.
Through encounters with this creative praxis over a decade, one has been prompted to reckon with the ways ‘slow violence’ is embedded in racial segregation, apartheid and land displacements in parallel with belligerent warfare scaring the earth. Feminist scholars such as Imani Jacqueline Brown engaged in Black ecologies acknowledge:
Black ecologies multiply;
they are migratory;
they resist ecologies of extinction.
Don’t be frightened;
Black ecologies won’t replace you,
they will repair you;
they will restore Us[v].
The act of folding within the sculptures in Wounded Flowers (2024-25) is a negation toward a hierarchy of form(s) and of the stiff frontality that accompanies several modernist masculinist practices. These offerings become textural emblems reminding of bodily contours, stages of grieving, entities held in states of repose—but not failure. Often conceived as extending root systems and living topographies, Pakkiyarajah creates in an environment where the humidity, vegetation, and cycle of seasons impact every facet of life. In this sense, the elements play a foundational role in the ways materiality braids, intertwines, and settles in place within these creations. In their phenomenological appearance, one is also reminded of the majestic fiber installations of Magdalena Abakanowicz using sisal and hemp rope. Her soft and rippling biomorphic works of the 1960s and 70s came to be named Abakans after her, and yet not enough is written on how the horrors of the Second World War also reflected within the textile bodies she rendered in boldness. The psychogeography of artists generations apart may entwine in uncanny ways.
In addition to the use of jute rope and hardened cloth, these sculptures are shaped with wood dust, which the artist reminds is ‘a byproduct of destruction, and thereby holds terrestrial history within it’. Works such as Grieving and Mycelium II, (2023–2025) are sensorial encounters as they move through a rising gradient of ecological despair that is accentuated in the toxic virulence of a new arms race, mining plunder on a vast scale from India to Congo, and genocidal violence in Palestine, Lebanon and Sudan. The smoke rises too in the sudden outpour of volcanoes; as I write this, Mount Etna—Europe’s highest active volcano—erupts spectacularly and as shocked tourists rush down its summit, the soaring ash rises to form a mushroom cloud[vi]. These strombolian explosions remind me of another of the artist’s expansive new installations called the Charred Hyphal Mat (2024–2025), which is exhibited for the first time in response to Experimenter’s house architecture—-forming a cloud forest and raising attention to perpetual threat from pyrotechnics of a world on fire.
[i] Carreira da Silva, F., & Vieira, M. B. (2024). Amílcar Cabral, Colonial Soil and thePolitics of Insubmission. Theory, Culture & Society, 42 (1), 19-35. (Original work published 2025)
[ii] Cabral Amílcar (1988 [1951]) O Problema da Erosão do Solo. Uma contribuição para o seu estudo na região de Cuba (Alentejo). In: Cabral Amílcar Estudos Agrários de Amílcar Cabral. Lisbon: IICT, pp. 81–173.
[iii] Ibid
[iv] Way of the Forest, Colomboscope 2024 Guidebook, ed. Natasha Ginwala
[v] https://imanijacquelinebrown.net/Black-Ecologies-an-opening-an-offering
[vi]https://www.npr.org/2025/06/02/g-s1-70041/mount-etna-erupts-volcano-italy-sicily
