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.

Sri Lanka’s multi-ethnic social uprising in 2022 deposed the then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a military-officer-turned-politician accused of war crimes, who oversaw one of the island’s worst financial crises since independence from British rule in 1948. The 2019 Easter bombings, covid pandemic, money creation, tax cuts, and farming policy all combined to create severe shortages of medical supplies, unprecedented inflation, increased prices for basic commodities, and depletion of foreign exchange reserves. Last summer Thenuwara spoke about seeing society change rapidly, having spent decades challenging the civil war and its legacies in his artistic practice and activism. ‘The movement is unprecedented, even organic’ – he explained – ‘shedding old school thinking. The whole country understands we need to free ourselves from the entrapment of militarization’.[1] Psychology studies scholar Shamala Kumar insisted Aragalaya shall ‘ignite our imaginations, and produce an awesome force, once again – but bigger – that leads to a radically different system of democracy’.[2] Thenuwara’s art has long pre-dated but is ultimately also part of that imaginative force. Sociologist Sasanka Perera has praised his ability to communicate: a practice that appeals to a wide public, able to decode its meaning, blurring boundaries between art and activism.[3]

For Thenuwara, art can contest and create new conceptual associations between images and political movements, by using beautiful cultural forms to draw in viewers and then provoke shifts in their perception.[4]Thenuwara is concerned with putting pressure on the aesthetic field by emphasising it as a site of ideological staging itself. 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. The lion’s tail in Covert implicitly refers to beliefs that Sri Lanka’s first Sinhalese king, Prince Vijaya (r.543-505 BCE), was descended from the animal – as told by historical chronicles like the Mahāvaṃsa(5^th century CE).[5] Although similar iconography was associated with Tamil dynasties in Sri Lanka and South India such as the Pallava (275-897 CE) and Chola (300s BCE-1279 CE), certain textual accounts sought to develop a distinct Sinhalese consciousness through ideological myth-making to support the elite ruling classes.[6] But the contours of the island’s many ethnic groups have been mutable and porous for thousands of years. Connections between Tamils and Sinhalese people have been defined by cohabitation, conflict, cultural exchange, as well as integration and assimilation.[7]

Buddhism – evoked by the lotus bud in Covert – took on a particular meaning for Sinhalese identity after the 7^th century CE, but in modern times it was British colonialism from 1796 that played a fundamental role in institutionalising ethnic differences.[8] Despite the term ‘Sinhalese Buddhist’ being coined in c.1906, the two have never been mutually exclusive.[9] If British rule laid foundations for later civil war, the war’s proponents used Sri Lanka’s deep past to legitimise contemporary conflict.[10] Covert’s stupa depicts Anuradhapura’s Buddhist Ruwanweli Maha Seya temple, built by Sinhalese king Dutugemunu in c.140 BCE, after defeating Tamil Chola king Elāra. Rajapaksa’s decision to swear his 2019 presidential oath at the site angered Thenuwara.[11] 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. 

Covert’s intricate lines also recall the illustrations in British-Sri Lankan art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy’s book Medieval Sinhalese Art (1908). Reproducing traditional craft through carefully-drawn diagrams, the publication recorded 18^th- and 19^th-century religious iconography from temple murals to sculptural reliefs. Coomaraswamy’s writing was fundamentally driven by his socialist anti-colonialism: conceptualising Sri Lanka in ways that were expansive and open in the context of South Asia, while agitating against British rule. He proclaimed: ‘Sinhalese art is essentially Indian, but possess this especial interest, that it is in many ways of an earlier character, and more truly Hindu – though Buddhist in intention, – than any Indian art surviving on the mainland’.[12] While such analysis is contested and contentious, it evokes an understanding of a Sri Lankan imagination unbound by the ethnic exclusivity that later defined the island’s civil war. If Covert alludes to Medieval Sinhalese Art, it is to imply that Sri Lanka’s cultural histories have been shaped by constantly shifting concepts of identity: while they can and have been put to sectarian ends, the aesthetic field also offers a space to radically reimagine the very political structures that produce such profound violence. Coomaraswamy himself believed ‘craftsmanship is a mode of thought’.[13]

For Coomaraswamy, 18^th- and 19^th-century Sri Lankan visual culture ‘was the art of a people for whom husbandry was the most honourable of all occupations, amongst whom the landless man was a nobody, and whose ploughmen spoke as elegantly as courtiers’.[14] Whether or not this claim is strictly speaking true, it is important to recognise the role landscape played in the island’s collective imagination from imperial conquest to anti-colonial struggles. Coomaraswamy’s focus was on Kandy in particular: a Sinhalese kingdom inherited in its final decades by Tamil monarchs, who practised Hinduism while patronising Buddhism.[15] The polity was the last in Sri Lanka to be conquered by European powers, having maintained a ring of defensive forests with thorn gates until 1815.[16] British rule subsequently cut down common lands, once used as a source of subsidence living and folk medicine, and installed mass tea or coffee plantations to extract wealth back to the UK.[17] Environmental destruction would continue in later decades after independence, while the civil war itself was waged over territorial control.[18] In Thenuwara’s own work, barrels have been reclaimed as artistic symbols: once associated with infrastructure development under British colonialism, later used for roadblocks as oppressive tools of military architecture.[19] Covert’s floor sculpture suggests the very ground under visitors’ feet is politically contested.

Curator Sandhini Poddar, who has supported the project’s development, recognises the way it ‘draws our attention to the fragile and fraught dystopia of contemporary Sri Lanka’.[20] For art historian Sharmini Pereira, Thenuwara’s drawings of thorns and spikes amidst other kinds of conflict debris employ landscape as a metaphor in a manner that ‘juxtaposes the apparatus of war with decaying nature as if to suggest peace will, wishfully, return through a cycle of  growth or rebirth’.[21] But the artist does not take nature for granted as an uncritical metaphor for Sri Lankan society after 2009, rather Covert challenges the way political symbols are often naturalised as part of larger structures of social control and oppression. Pereira notes that Thenuwara pictures natural landscapes in transition or transformation, while art critic Azara Jaleel sees similar states of flux or fervour and commends his active artistic participation in Aragalaya.[22] Covert’s symbols swell and seep across sculptures and drawings, as though they are aesthetic forms in constant motion: congealing into certain shapes before shattering and reconstituting. The work suggests that cultural symbols can never be entirely co-opted for sectarian ends: not only can icons be reclaimed, but more importantly throughout history Sri Lankans and their collective imagination have never neatly fallen exclusively between irreconcilably or impermeably-bounded ethnic groups. 

Militarism sorts people into hierarchical categories of us-and-them as a tool for structuring power. But violence can transform all those who encounter it: spiralling out of their control, shattering boundaries between bodies.[23] Covert’s delicately-drawn details give way to a mass of contorting forms at a distance, as seemingly unstable concepts and corporeal forms cascade into each other. The cylindrical tower also recalls barrel motifs or monumental designs used across Thenuwara’s practice. In 2000, the artist created the Monument for the Disappeared on the Raddoluwa intersection of the Colombo-Katunayake Road in a memorial to those abducted and killed as a result of the civil war.[24] In recent years, Thenuwara has spoken about memorialisation as a means to critically reflect on the causes and consequences of conflict as a form of collective mourning and warning.[25] 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.