Since the 1920s, a visual culture of queer ecological art has crafted an aesthetics of abundance in Sri Lanka.
Join art historian Dr Edwin Coomasaru for a look at the relationships between gender, sexuality, capitalism, and climate in recent exhibitions: Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s Idols of Mud and Water at Glasgow Tramway (2023-24), alongside Chathuri Nissansala in The Order of Nature at Lunuganga (2023-24) and Ritualising Mutant Encounters (2024) at Barefoot.
Drawing on Geoffrey Bawa’s own queer environmental framings, this lecture will situate Nithiyendran and Nissansala’s work in relation to contemporaneous events: from Aragalaya-Porattam protests and Jaffna Queer Festival’s ‘queer ecology’ theme in 2022, to ongoing attempts to decriminalise homosexuality as ‘against the order of nature’ under the 1883 British Penal Code. Where colonialism and ethnonationalism manufactured structures of social and environmental scarcity, Nithiyendran and Nissansala build imaginative worlds of abundance.
Dr Edwin Coomasaru is a Mid-Career Fellow at Yale University’s Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Visiting Fellow at University College London, and Reviews Editor for Visual Culture in Britain. Coomasaru is currently writing a book on Queer Ecologies and Abundant Aesthetics in Sri Lankan Art, 1926-2024.