A similar conceptual and aesthetic tension could be found in the work of Premarasa at Niru Ratnam. The artist’s solo exhibition comprised a series of paintings in which family members, hybrid creatures and bold, colourful shapes unfold in strange spaces, setting figurative imagery against empty abstract voids that recall Joseph’s delicate drawings. At the centre of Little Golden Memories FIG.13, for example, is a portrait of the artist’s grandmother as a young woman created using AI. In her lap is a basket of pomegranates from Jaffna, in the north of the island, while surrounding her are an open birdcage adorned with Tamil script, a tree frog in an open-collar shirt and shorts, and a framed image of the Grim Reaper. Death is a recurring motif for the artist, as evidenced by Silent Sons FIG.14, which depicts a family funeral at Ilford Cemetery. A yellow void stands in for the body, around which a raven eats Sri Lankan food served on banana leaves; a one-legged fox stands upright beneath a banana tree; and two human torsos with pigeon and frog heads gesticulate at one another. Having visited the island again this year after nearly two decades, Premarasa makes work that is as much about Britain as it is about Sri Lanka. Her fragmented compositions speak to the dislocations of diaspora, as well as the legacies of the civil war – a conflict that is at once distant from and intimately entangled with the United Kingdom.
Although such themes pervade Premarasa’s imagery, the only overt reference to the civil war in the exhibition was the representation of a Sri Lankan government military helicopter in Kuyili FIG.15. Simultaneously threatening and absurd, it hovers mid-air with a human-sized tree frog leering out of the open hatch, its eyes wide and mouth agog. The painting might also gesture towards other connections between Britain and Sri Lanka. During research for a book published in 2020, the journalist Phil Miller uncovered shocking material in the National Archives. With the knowledge, and often the approval of, government ministers and civil servants, from the 1980s to 2000s former members of the Special Air Service – many of whom had been deployed during Britain’s own thirty-year civil war in Northern Ireland (1968–98) – flew aircraft for and trained Sri Lankan troops accused of war crimes. Those troops were, in turn, sent to Belfast to observe British military techniques first hand. This exchange extended beyond private mercenaries: the British Army helped establish a Sri Lankan military academy in 1997, and from 2010 to 2021 Police Scotland trained Sri Lankan officers. Sivanandan’s phrase, ‘we are here because you were there’, need not refer only to the colonial past but also to the imperial present.