RAJNI PERERA

It comes to me in waves

Curated by Sayem Khan at Patel Brown Toronto

It comes to me in waves explores the landscape of memory through material languages of artists whose practices engage in translations of remembrance. Within the exhibition, themes of selfhood, national and diasporic identities, ancestry, and intergenerationality come to the fore, weaving the viewer into a tapestry of intricate and interlinked histories that illuminate the richness and potency of collective and individual memories. The title alludes to the reverberative experience of memories - how they wash over us during particular moments of nostalgia, and leave to come back again. Works in the exhibition speak to the cyclical nature of time and the experience of that cyclicality as embodied in the feeling of nostalgia, receding and crashing back, like waves of a sea to a shore. 

In the exhibition, memories open up to subjective and contextualized interpretations, sculpting conventions of history and remembrance as ever-evolving landscapes of experiences, rather than fixed moments in time. The emotional landscape of remembrance becomes more, or at least equally, compelling as any factual analysis or understanding of what has transpired or taken place. A metaphysical resonance of time and space emerges that focuses on the experience of remembering and how that informs our relationship to ourselves and each other. The habitation of memory, or how our memory lives within us, and our relationships with the act of remembrance, is intimately retrieved and translated by the artists in this exhibition. Like the scar of an old wound, or the impression of a body on a bed well slept on, memory sits within and awakens a tender resolution in the act of its own remembrance.

Rajni Perera pushes the foundational experience of remembrance, underpinning her work with critical fabulations on the possibilities afforded to us through explorations of our past. Pulling from the shamanistic spiritual traditions of Yaku Tovil, from  her country of origin, Perera preciously uncouples Sri Lanka’s vast and overlooked histories from its colonized past. The artist weaves a new narrative history that draws from stories on pre-scientific astronomy, shamanism, and tribal and national histories to help us imagine ourselves embroiled in a rich tapestry of pasts and imagined futures. Within her works, Perera animates fantasies enriched by revelations of mythologies and stories that are delicately revealed to the viewer. Within this process, she articulates material and visual languages that illuminated her childhood and reawakens a compassion for folk traditions and communal values ever-present across Global South communities.