T. Vinoja’s practice is anchored in how stories of belonging intersect with mass violence, locating her works in vibrant living ecologies as sentient grounds entwining human and geologic timescales. Through meticulous material studies and dialogical approaches, her artistic work surveys the ways necropolitics enters daily life amid wartime and constant displacement.
Observing wounded histories and suturing fragments of remembering, Vinoja addresses multitudinous facets of Sri Lanka’s civil war decades and unresolved aftermath relaying how ethnic as well as linguistic division, weaponized realities and state brutality collude in delivering generational loss as well as environmental toxicity devastating lands and waters. She registers how alienation and rupture of the domestic sphere interrupted her childhood years, which included separation from her grandmother and fleeing by sea to find refuge in Southern India. Her small-scale pieces made with needlework, acrylic, and found materials including items of clothing, reflect a responsive aesthetic of portability and crafting within realms of urgency. They bear the demarcations of escape routes, tents, barbed wire, scars of land mines, check points, and artillery shelling— represented in dense patterning, dots, lines, and topographical mappings— scripted from memory, field recordings, and sustained conversations among Tamil elders, former neighbours, humanitarian activists, and disabled youth across the Northern peninsula. In particular, T. Vinoja has been committed to listening as a strength-giving practice despite systemic erasures, forced silencing and political censoring of testimonial records.
T. Vinoja’s oeuvre unveils as a subjective document of ‘impermissible evidence’ that is more complex and sensorially rich than neatly categorized journalistic or forensic records. Returning to rest in cyclical forms, she renews energy to confront disappearances with resistant acts of creative recovery.
Exhibition essay excerpts by Natasha Ginwala.
Natasha Ginwala was co-curator of Sharjah Biennial 16 (2023-25), Artistic Director of Colomboscope, Sri Lanka (since 2019), and Associate Curator at Large for Gropius Bau.
T. Vinoja (b. 1991) lives and works in Kilinochchi, Sri Lanka.
