Pala Pothupitiye: Mapping a Sri Lankan Consciousness

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Pala Pothupitiye: Mapping a Sri Lankan Consciousness features works by acclaimed contemporary artist Pala Pothupitiye, whose practice draws from diverse visual, cultural, and mythological sources to interrogate the whole of Sri Lankan history. The exhibition highlights Pothupitiye’s most well-known body of work—cartographic paintings in which the artist deploys various maps of the island as fields for his imaginative portrayals of imperial and national ambitions, colonial desires, religious and ethnic identities, and modern-day conflict. Pothupitiye’s concern with the legacies of colonialism—particularly the administrative categories that—like maps—variously divided Sri Lanka’s population—become evident in a second body of works that foreground the artistry and aesthetics of the ritual dance community into which he was born.

Header: Pala Pothupitiye, Erasing Emerging, 2021 (detail). Acrylic on canvas. Collection of Dr. Sukumar Nagendran. Photo: Katie Jones-Weinert

Pala Pothupitiye, Self-Portrait, 2024. Mixed media on canvas. Collection of Dr. Sukumar Nagendran

The exhibition places Pothupitiye’s works in conversation with Sri Lankan manuscripts and sculptures, Buddhist and Hindu, drawn from the Fernando Family Collection. These artworks, which range in date from the fourth through nineteenth centuries, provide a foundation for understanding the vision of Sri Lankan history that guides Pothupitiye’s artmaking. The richness of that history, as well as its many complexities, are further underscored in this exhibition by the black and white photographs of Dr. Quintus Fernando which elegantly capture Sri Lanka’s post-independence heritage.

Manuscript with Covers bearing the Solosmasthanas and the Four Cosmic Rivers, Sri Lanka, Kandyan Period. Paint and gold on wood. Gift of Barry Fernando MD and Coleene Fernando MD