CASSIE MACHADO, LIONEL WENDT, VASANTHA YOGANANTHAN

Kandyan musician Amunugama Suramba is mid-movement. He beats a wooden double-headed gata beraya drum, worn around his waist, playing a song with sacred Buddhist associations. He stands on a grassy ridge, the low-angle perspective framing his figure against a dramatic sky. Modernist photographer Lionel Wendt’s (1900-44) black-and-white gelatin silver print, Suramba drumming(c.1933-44), is part of a new group show of modern and contemporary Sri Lankan photography at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. Exhibited alongside Wendt are Cassie Machado (b.1982) and Vasantha Yogananthan (b.1985), all three of whom have both Sri Lankan and European ancestry, transnationalism having shaped the lives and practices of each. Photography itself can be traced back to 1840s Sri Lanka, its first century almost exclusively in service of colonial rule, depicting essentialised ethnographic types or picturesque landscapes ripe for exploitation. Wendt, Machado, and Yogananthan’s experimental aesthetics, by contrast, have sought to challenge the medium’s imperial history. Yogananthan’s series A Myth of Two Souls (2013-2021) is a contemporary retelling of the Ramayana, an ancient Indian epic text written in stages between the seventh and third centuries BCE. Machado’s body of photograms, When Colours Return Home to Light(2024), is an imaginative collaboration with Wendt: employing some of the novel techniques he pioneered, to explore present-day South and Southeast Asian diasporic identities in Europe.

Read the full essay by Dr. Edwin Coomasaru here.