COVERT: CHANDRAGUPTHA THENUWARA

A monumental column, Chandraguptha Thenuwara's Covert (2021-23) is composed of intricate and interlocking iron filigree symbols painted black: lotus buds, bodies, barbed wire, thorns, stupas, lion tails, weapons, vehicles. Exhibited at the Venice Biennale last year, it travelled to Colombo's Lionel Wendt Art Gallery in 2023, where a new floor sculpture sprouts out from its base like tree roots. The installation marks Thenuwara's annual memorial show dedicated to Black July, the anti-Tamil pogrom at the start of Sri Lanka's civil war (1983-2009), exactly forty years ago. The cylinder towers over its viewers at 222.5 cm in height and 91.4 cm in diameter, while interweaving lines on the ground cover a 550x550 cm area. On the walls are large-scale black and white drawings, showing similar patterns in ink: expansive landscapes in which icons associated with the conflict recur in two-dimensions. As part of Thenuwara's longstanding anti-war activism and artistic practice, Covert considers the way collective violence puts pressure on the aesthetic field as visual culture is co-opted into militaristic iconography. But while the series works to reveal such strategies, it also strives to undermine them: to appropriate and reinvent such symbolism in protest against its weaponization and the profound violence that accompanies it. Begun just before the 2022 Aragalaya protests, Covert is also deeply committed to the imaginative potential of contemporary art to picture political possibilities in alliance with wider social movements.

 

Covert's delicately-traced lines seek to reveal and disrupt political strategies which naturalise symbolism to covertly conceal operations of power, often by drawing on metaphysical icons taken from the natural world. Covert uses two-dimensional lines to emphasise political symbolism as a cultural practice that requires reduction or simplification alongside repetition to create impact. But for all that specific motifs recur throughout Thenuwara's sculpture and drawings with an appearance that evokes the diagrammatic, his illustrated forms constantly threaten to overwhelm and collapse their neatly demarcated boundaries. Thorns spill into barbed wire, bodies slip into swords. Covert put pressures on the mechanisms that underpin militarism by unmasking its attempt to naturalise social divisions. 

 

Although begun before the Aragalaya movement erupted in 2022, Covert prompts questions about how its legacy might be recorded in visual culture - particularly following brutal police crackdowns, IMF bailouts with austerity conditions, and ongoing economic suffering. In such a climate, Thenuwara's work remains as urgent as ever. Covert seeks to both diagnose and disrupt certain aesthetic techniques of power: the artistic series aims to dramatize and denaturalise the creation or consolidation of sectarian iconography in contemporary Sri Lankan politics.