Artists:
Aakriti Chandervanshi, Chathuri Nissansala, Debashruti Aich, Kritika Sriram, Madhurjya Dey, Naira Mushtaq, Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah, Sarban Chowdhury, Sumaiya Sirin, T. Krishnapriya, U. Arulraj, and Uditha Ekanayake
In her novel Enter Ghost (2023) by Isabella Hammad, a character says, “...it’s a choice between life and death. But really, what Mariam is pointing out is–there’s a third way. You can be a ghost.” In this snapshot of a person's life revolving around Palestinian liberation, the novel asks larger questions about life and death: What does being a ghost or apparition mean, beyond the notion of horror? How do we experience it as emotions of longing, curiosity, fear, and even catharsis? How do we understand our present with these emotions about apparitions? What could this in-between space of being a ghost look like for each of us? Most importantly, how do we live knowing that ghosts surround us in the past, present and future?
This exhibition presents works by multiple artists of South Asian origin attempting to answer the above questions with a experimental visuals of their memories, emotionalities, and socio-cultural experiences. The ghost in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet enters in the form of Hamlet’s dead father who reminds him of dire circumstances (like his mother’s marriage to his uncle) that are hidden within the seemingly peaceful land. The Ghost haunts yet it also exaggerates. Disbelief is a normal response to the Ghost’s haunting, yet there is truth to what it exposes. Each artwork in this exhibition presents a haunting with a visual response that each artist has arrived at, in their search for the truth about what a Ghost has exposed to them. Some consider the apparition as a literal ghost while some explore it as a metaphor.
Many of these artists journey with or toward a Ghost in attempts to revive familial archives, memories, and personal truths while others approach their practice as surviving a house of horrors that challenge their community’s or landscape’s presence. Finally, a few artists treat the materialities of their works as Ghosts themselves; approaching matter and medium with a will to experiment, claim space, and beckon an afterlife if need be.
Ghosts of Familial Pasts
Aakriti Chandervanshi examines the ghosts of her family through archival photographs from her great aunt’s box of memories found under her bed after her death. Chandervanshi reassembles and reinterprets these archives only to realise that the great aunt whose intense gaze she used to avoid, was a person with multitudes of defiance, solitude, longing, and care. A photograph of her great aunt’s wedding shows her in the iconic pose of a Hindu woman with her head covered in a dupatta, wearing a garland of marigolds, and walking seven rounds with her husband—who is not in the frame—taking a vow to be with each other for seven lives. The floral motifs around the photograph are introduced by Chandervanshi in an attempt to embed not only her great aunt’s love for gardening but also the softness and delicate soul beneath her hard exterior. Chandervanshi’s works are not just about reinventing her great aunt—they are also moments of deep self-reflection as the artist herself navigates the world as a young woman in 21st century South Asia.
From Jaffna, in the North of Sri Lanka, T. Krishnapriya remembers her family’s history of operating a letterpress during the Civil War through the tangibility of embossed drawings. Krishnapriya interacts with her ghosts by combining the materiality of paper and the techniques of mark making and drawing that bring in a permanence to her layered memories of a childhood lived amidst a war, displacement, and early signs of a gruelling climate crisis. Growing up, Krishnapriya would watch her father work with his letterpress machine to create advertisements, pamphlets, and brochures that would later circulate among citizens experiencing the instability of the North. After inheriting the press, its archives, and hidden memories, she creates her embossed drawings that can be read both as cartographies of the North of Sri Lanka and abstract depictions of her childhood mementoes.
Naira Mushtaq, too, returns to her familial roots in Pakistan using an almost surrealistic style to depict years after the partitioning of India. Time plays a significant role in her recreations of memories as she attempts to paint their imperfections, distortions. She says, “What happens to the memories as time goes by; time plays a fundamental role in wearing down these memories of our experiences, they diverge, they mold, evolve or dissipate—such is the play of time. Our memories deceive us, pliable and ever evolving. We are left with fragments of truth, distorting records of our making.” The fragmentary nature of personal, familial histories can be seen in her canvases with quick yet sharp brushstrokes that shape persons and landscapes engulfed by grief, longing, and a desire for belonging. Each figure stands alone yet not lonely, facing the political, social, and cultural injustices of being exiled from their homeland.
Surviving a House of Horrors
Several artists in Apparitions cross the threshold of the ghosts of their personal histories and delve into deeper politics that emerge from the systemic erasures of their communities and landscapes. These works do not merely reckon with past traumas and ghosts but also highlight survival in a house of horrors.
Kritika Sriram’s photographs in Booklet of Banned Objects capture India’s Dalit community through objects that have been ‘banned’ for them socially over centuries through the unspoken rules of a rigid caste system. Sriram poses for photographs with roses, shoes, gold ornaments, and a white dhoti, and complements the self-portraits with writings by Dr. B. Ambedkar who championed the struggle of the Dalit community towards equality in an oppressive hierarchy that envisions them as ‘untouchables.’ Sriram challenges today’s audiences to visualise members of the Dalit community as citizens with dignity, confidence, and rights—things that their past and present ghosts in the form of social systems continue to deny.
Haputale based Sri Lankan artist U.Arulraj depicts the house of horrors in which the Malaiyaga Tamil community of Sri Lanka has lived for many centuries now, after being brought by the British to work on tea and rubber plantations in Central Sri Lanka. Arulraj highlights how this history has continued to plague his community in their small line housing with minimal amenities, wages amounting to less than 400 Indian rupees a day, and difficult working conditions with limited access to clean toilets and sanitation services. The inevitable physical toll of the labourer is juxtaposed against the shrill loudness of Sri Lanka’s booming tea and tourism industries. Arulraj asks, “at what cost?”
From the neighbouring city of Batticaloa in the East of Sri Lanka, Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah draws landscapes that are waning, dissipating, and becoming ghost-like due to climate disasters and humidity that overwhelm the area. His drawings of mangroves, vegetation, and natural borders created by lakes, the sea, and the Batticaloa lagoon are reminders of the hostility of the 2004 tsunami which severely affected the area and its people who were already experiencing the negative impact of the Civil War. Rupaneethan’s subtle gestures with the pen and watercolour create vegetal beings of cellular existence that mimic a post-war landscape in need of reparation. For Rupaneethan, his hometown is a ghost in need of a new life.
Madhurjya Dey borrows from a similar notion of the hometown in relation to his roots in Assam, North East India. Dey challenges audiences to imagine a community, a land ravaged by conflict, merging photography and painting in a dark, monochromatic palette. In this unique technique of visually and conceptually combining reality and fiction, he inquiries of amnesia, erasure, knowledge production, and rejection related to the North East in today’s fast paced world. His melancholia is depicted through imagery such as weapons, backhoes, surveillance equipment, and archival photographs of known and unknown families. Dey’s works are invitations to conjure Ghosts of geographical and social divides based on a hunger for administrative power. Dey’s historical fiction speak loudly on canvases and prints on paper about the lasting impacts of such greed on the everyday citizen of the North East.
Ghostly Materialities
Materiality, for the artists in this exhibition, is a tool of experimentation as much as of expression. Each artists covets their bond with a specific tangibility of a medium that they almost revere while challenging their relationship with it. These materialities themselves are hauntingly beautiful as each piece layers and connects the familiar with the unfamiliar.
Debashruti Aich uses rice paper as her material of choice, combining it with textile, embroidery, and watercolour. Aich depicts human figures with no features merging into interior residues of her cultural background in Jharkhand, India. Aich emphasises each character’s body simultaneously as imperfect and sexual through layers of paper and fabric cutouts that stay together with a unique texture. The nude stands alongside flora much like in the Garden of Eden: fresh, incorrupt, beautiful, although bound to sin.
In contrast to Aich’s figures, Sri Lankan artist Chathuri Nissansala convenes her ghosts through intricate beadwork that resemble the spectrum of sexuality and gender. Nissansala queers artmaking by questioning aestheticisation of art altogether, and shows a bead in its completion, uniqueness, and small size. Beads in their combined forms appear like puzzles that desire decoding and organisation, yet Nissansala defies them by rejecting stereotypes, ghosts of the past.
Bengali artist Sumaiya Sirin deals with a similar notion of the memento, protective charm, or trinket which we latch on to for emotional support. Through her soft sculptural pieces that combine found objects and imperfect threadwork, she highlights what helps us get through the everyday. For Sirin, the Ghost is not a decipherable object or person or memory. It is her daily surroundings which are full of totemic gestures that elevate her creative thinking and expression. The combination of soft sculpture and found objects in Sirin’s works holds a soft quietude that soothes the Ghost.
Sri Lankan artist Uditha Ekanayake’s series of cyanotype on watercolour paper embraces the ghostliness of the medium itself as it transfers colour onto a different surface asking the maker to trust the temporality of the medium and process. The stillness of cyanotype is the result of constant experimentation with pigment and surfaces, and Ekanayake headless floating figures remind us of actual ghosts that lurk among us—unseen and unavailable. The mystery of his Ghost lies in his process of blue hues.
While materials and processes of the above artists engulf us in the unspoken presence of a Ghost, Sarban Chowdhury attempts to sculpt objects that he has never seen or experienced before. Using ceramic as his primary medium accompanied by stoneware, terracotta, porcelain, wood, and iron, he fires each piece with emotionality coupled with the concreteness of its sculptural form. For Chowdhury, each piece begins with an existential crisis about the form its afterlife or ghost would take. Each hand movement and moment of temperature change of the kiln could lead to an unintended outcome which he embraces.
- Pramodha Weerasekera, 23 February 2026, Colombo, Sri Lanka
