GROUP EXHIBITION

Yogananthan’s titular hand-painted photograph, capturing a waterfall in the Indian state Karnataka, is part of his series, A Myth of Two Souls (2016-2021), inspired by the Sanskrit myth, the Ramayana. In the story, the protagonist Rama is banished to the forests with his wife Sita and brother Lakshmana. Although they adapt and create an idyllic life, their tranquility is shattered when Sita is kidnapped and a great war ensues. Yogananthan traced and restaged the story across South Asia over a seven year period. His collection of images, including Dandaka #2 taken in the woodland Rama was said to live, use colour to centre the mystical, nourishing qualities of the natural world.

In contrast, Joydeb Roaja purges his drawings of vitality. His black ink drawings portray the harsh experiences of his indigenous community in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts. His figures are entwined with the natural world and at times, share the pictorial plane with army personnel, guns and ammunition recalling the historic military occupation of the hill area. This presence remains imprinted in the communities’ collective memory with Roaja’s works forming an empowering call to demand autonomy and ensure preservation of these minority cultures who have a deeply symbiotic relationship with their land.

Muhanned Cader’s majestic paintings of Sri Lanka’s alluring environments with lush trees and glistening shorelines are in a similar way, concerned with protection and conservation. As an artist associated with the ‘90s Trend, a group who responded critically to Sri Lanka’s Civil War from 1983-2009, Cader’s images are underscored by a scepticism of colonial and post-colonial governmental policy. The tranquil images belie a land negotiating heavy extractive activities and overdevelopment. These landscapes reveal the instability beneath idyllic terrain, exploring how history and power are embedded within environments shaped by conflict and extraction.

The earthy pigments Suleman Aqeel Khilji utilises in his atmospheric paintings recall the arid landscapes of Balochistan, where he grew up. Now based in London, his hazy, figurative artworks portray people from photos, or real-life encounters, superimposing them against imagined or remembered backgrounds. Goat (2025), a tender scene showing three figures petting a goat, is informed by the memory of a lost photograph. Working from recollection and imagination, Khilji treats painting as a landscape for recollection, where fragmented memories and displaced identities surface through intimate figuration and remembered backgrounds.

Courtesy Jhaveri Contemporary. Text: Dr. Cleo Roberts.