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In a recent interview, Sri Lankan–born British author Romesh Gunesekara quipped that his “difficult name” was more likely to be misspelled in his homeland than it was abroad. He also revealed that he often felt displaced as a kid in Colombo, less so as an adult in London. This latter notion of feeling estranged from, or dislocated within, one’s country of birth is depicted in Hema Shironi’s A Bundle of Joy , 2020—an installation consisting of ten colorful cloth bundles covered with stitched silhouettes of the many homes and towns the artist’s family had to move between, or leave behind, after Sri Lanka’s civil war ended in 2009. In contrast with the multiple shows in which diasporic artists examine issues of migration, exile, and alienation overseas (including, presumably, the next Venice Biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere”), this exhibition, simply titled “The Foreigners,” brings the exploration of otherness back home.
The question of who belongs and who doesn’t is not new to Sri Lanka; the issue has been central to the country’s modern conflicts (based on ethnolinguistic divides or postwar Islamophobia) as well as its ancient epics (from the Ramayana to the Mahāvam.sa ). The island’s varying names—from Serendib to Taprobana to Ceylon—are reflective of the imprint of foreigners. This exhibition, curated by Sandev Handy and Sharmini Pereira, acquires special impact and relevance against its current backdrop: It is being held at a time when scores of Sri Lankans are leaving the country—or are looking to leave—due to the dire economic and political situation, and this sense of being alienated at home is heightened. At times the show takes a light and literal approach, confronting us with the obvious trope of the white expatriate in a bathing suit at a plush hotel (as in the photograph Tourist, Ahungalla , 1991, by Stephen Champion) or evoking the lingual dissonance oft felt by Tamil-, Sinhala-, or English-speaking communities when faced with a national language they don’t understand (as in Sumudi Suraweera and Dinelka Liyanage’s video Threshold (Part I) , 2021, in which city scenes are spliced with soundscapes of two Sinhala-speaking artists trying to decipher signboards in Tamil).
The exhibition is at its strongest, however, when it challenges our ingrained ways of seeing—as it does in Nina Mangalanayagam and Oliver Barrett’s Balancing Act , 2012, a split-screen video installation in which we see a pair of feet diligently following demarcated lines along a gym floor before finally relenting and jumping over them in a childlike manner. Overlaying the choreography of these strained and relaxed gestures is Barrett’s fusion of national anthems and poetic reflections on being an outsider, narrated by the artist. “I cannot change you, I can only change myself,” we hear Mangalanayagam say at the end. Shown in this context, Balancing Act itself feels less limited to interpretation; the point is not to explain to a Western audience the artist’s experience of her hybrid Sri Lankan and Scandinavian heritage, but to address the universal experience of shedding generational trauma. Similarly, Shyama Golden’s painting Rooms II , 2018, showing the artist and her husband dressed as yakka , or demons (a figure used to represent, but also to ward off, evil), sitting at a table together in their Brooklyn apartment, subverts fear by embodying, embracing, and having fun with it. Like many other artists in the show, Golden draws from her own life to evoke the idea that everyone in some way feels like a stranger. This is an exhibition less interested in representing or replicating the concept of “the foreigners” by selecting works, for example, by artists of Burgher, Muslim, or Tamil background, or from any other communities that have been ostracized in Sri Lanka. Instead, it presents us with a series of vignettes—a collection of “short stories” of autobiographical fiction, much in the same vein as Sri Lanka’s most prized authors.
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