Gihansa Galhenage

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

අපි කොහෙද යන්නේ (where do we go?)

The history of Sri Lanka’s tea plantations is intrinsically woven with the legacies of its colonial past. These verdant terrains are imbued with narratives of an enduring legacy from which the British colonial governance built to extract economic gain from the natural resources provided by the island. As tea cultivation expanded, the British entrepreneurs capitalised on the emerging trade and branded it under Sri Lanka’s colonial name Ceylon, essentially marking the establishment of Ceylon Tea. 

By the early 20th century, Sri Lanka became the fourth largest exporter of tea. In addition, the British had introduced many Eurocentric ideologies and hierarchical structures within the plantations which formed violent ethnic tensions between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority. Large numbers of oppressed caste Malaiyaha Tamils (Up-country Tamils) were brought from South India as indentured labourers to work in the island’s central highlands. Despite the Up-country Tamils’ integral and significant contribution to the country’s economic pedestal, they continue to be one of the most ostracized communities living in the marginalised state of Sri Lankan politics. Sri Lanka gained independence from the British Colonial rule on the 4th of February 1948, one of which the first acts of the government was the Ceylon Citizenship Act, which denied citizenship to the majority of the Up-country Tamils. 

This marked the beginning of post colonial resonances where access to citizenship and rights were filtered through ethnic identity, furthermore these tensions ultimately led to the Sri Lankan civil war3 of 1983, which lasted from 1983-2009. My identity as a Sri Lankan, Sinhalese woman was rooted in my daily consumption of tea which encouraged me to delve into how my identity and Sri Lanka’s global identity have been shaped by the history of tea. My praxis of visual and conceptual interventions stands as critical articulations of the collective imaginaries shaped by histories of subjugation and migration within Sri Lankan tea plantations. My primary material, used teabags, function as both a literal and metaphorical conduit for the colonial and post colonial histories of Sri Lanka. Through this material, I embody Sri Lanka’s deep entanglement with colonial ideologies whilst also depicting the significance of tea as both commodity and national identity. What is ordinarily discarded becomes a vessel of memory and a site where histories are reviewed and contested. The sculptural form of the suitcase recurs throughout my practice as a central metaphor. 

The suitcase is an object of transit, associated with migration, travel and temporality. The Up- country Tamils lives have been dictated and defined by mobility from forced migration, repatriation, and internal ethnic conflict. These suitcases constitute a state of perpetual movement and unsettling, yet they simultaneously exist in a paradox of impracticality. Several of these suitcases are transformed into theatre scapes that house the intricacy of shadow puppetry. Within these ephemeral objects, shadow puppetry becomes an act of memorialisation and remembrance of suppressed histories. These shadow puppets are materialised through integral accounts of research and archival material; therefore, memory operates as a point of access where each source embodies a distinct register of remembrance. 

By utilising distinct imageries of violence, I create silhouettes to form a fluid narrative and to interrogate historical and ongoing constructs of visibility and erasure. My body of work operates as a space for representation and critical reflection of the ongoing conflicts in my country, further interrogating how the oppressive systems of marginalisation continue to shape how memory, labour and identity are continuously performed and reimagined.