Art, Architecture and Postcolonial Nation-Building in Sri Lanka

May 5, 2022
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Online Via Zoom

Image from the book, The A to Z of Conflict (2019) by Abdul Halik Azeez et al. Courtesy Raking Leaves and the artists.

Image from the book, The A to Z of Conflict (2019) by Abdul Halik Azeez et al. Courtesy Raking Leaves and the artists.

This event will take place via Zoom. Please register here.

How are the ideological forces of nationalism and the nation-state, geopolitics, and identity, visualized and spatialized in art and architecture? What are the possibilities and limitations of re-imagining home, community, and nation in Sri Lanka?

Offering a trajectory from the mid-20th century to today, Dr. Tariq Jazeel (Professor, Department of Geography, University College London, and author of Sacred Modernity: nature, environment and the postcolonial geographies of Sri Lankan nationhood), and Sharmini Pereira (Chief Curator, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka, and Founder, Raking Leaves Publishing), will share and discuss insights on their work and projects, inviting us to reconsider the aesthetics of national formations through tropical modernism, language, translation and counter-hegemonic histories. The discussion will be moderated by Jin Wang and Deborah Phillip.