About the Artists
Abdullah MI Syed
Dr. Abdullah M. I. Syed (b. 1974) is a Pakistani-born contemporary artist and designer working between Sydney, Karachi and New York. His art practice weaves real and fictional narratives of east and west, seamlessly knitting together cultural and art historical references and concerns from each. Trained in diverse disciplines, Syed utilises a variety of mediums and techniques including sculpture, video installations, drawing, performance and texts to investigate collisions between art, religion, economy and politics.
Syed holds a PhD in Art, Media and Design (2015) and a Master of Fine Arts (2009) from University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He also holds a Bachelor of Art in Design (1999) and a Master of Education (2001) from University of Central Oklahoma (UCO), Edmond, Oklahoma, USA. Syed is part of eleven, a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators and writers.
Syed has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and performed at the Asia Triennial of Performance Art (Asia TOPA 2017) in Melbourne, Pataka Museum in Proirua, Art Central in Hong Kong, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney, and Stage Centre in Oklahoma. Syed’s work is held in many private and public collections notably Devi Art Foundation, Rangoonwala Foundation, AAN Collection, Blacktown Arts Centre, Casula Powerhouse, University of Central Oklahoma and the US State Department Art in Embassy Islamabad.
Syed has undertaken artist residencies at Fairfield City Museum and Gallery (2015-2016), Parramatta Artists Studios (2013-2015), Cicada Press (2009 and 2013) and Blacktown Arts Centre (2011) in Sydney. His awards include the Blacktown Art Prize (2010), the UNSW Postgraduate Research Scholarship (2009) and the IAO Installation Art Award (2003). Syed was highly commended in the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize (2014) and was a finalist in the Hazlehurst Prize (2015), Moran Photography Prize (2014) and the Blake Prize (2013 and 2016).
Kingsley Gunatillake
Born in 1951 in Kandy, Kingsley Gunatillake's practice involves painting, drawing and installation.He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Fine Art University of Colombo in 1979 and a Diploma in Environmental Education from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow in 1994. He has had several solo exhibitions in Sri Lanka, the UK, the Philippines, Ireland, Scotland, India and Japan. He has also participated in many group exhibitions and international artist camps both in Sri Lanka and abroad, most recently in France, the UK, Japan, Pakistan, India and at the Seongnam International Art Fair in Korea. Gunatillake has also been the recipient of a number of national awards since 1980 as well as international awards from both Czechoslovakia and Japan. He is a council member of the Vibhavi Academy Fine Arts and a founder of Child Art Studio. Gunatillake’s painting, sculpture and installations can be found in many local collections, including the Sri Lankan Presidential Collection of Contemporary Art. He currently works out of his studio in Kandy and Colombo.
Liz Fernando
My research though at a personal as well as academic level into the role of photography engages with the different meanings that photography, inhabits, often dealing with the notions of memory wherein the personal archive inhabits a fundamental space, both aesthetically and practically within non-western cultures. It surrounds the idea that the objective of a photograph in South Asia ponders an evolving interplay between its fragile and fugitive existence. In Sri Lanka, the place of my ethnic origin, humidity leads the object of a photograph into a painful slow and unstoppable deterioration process until it vanishes completely, as though it had never existed. From the Missing Metamemory of Trincomallee bears exactly this lack of materiality and the resulting void in my own contemporary identity based upon the missing visual traces of my immediate family history and the almost forensic search for traces to escape this void. Post-colonial Trincomalee, the Eastern Province capital of Sri Lanka builds the backdrop of this search. In the family history it is my fathers birthplace, which he left behind 1956 by the age of four and never returned.
In Sri Lanka’s collective memory it is a synonym for what was to become the war ravaged North. These tender almost non-existing autobiographical memories are the fragile traces that lead me on the journey to find a naked nothingness.
Mithu Sen
Mithu Sen is a New Delhi based artist/poet who studied painting at Santiniketan, Visva Bharati, India and Glasgow School of Art, UK. Sen‘s practice stems from a conceptual and interactive drawing
background that has extended into drawing, video, sculpture, installation, poetry, sound and performance. Her journey critic’s subtle hierarchical codes and hegemony imposed in the society;
those areas where humanity becomes minority (sexual, political, regional, emotional or lingual).
Blending fact and fiction, self-reflective, playful and bold- a macabre sense of humor punctuates her work with deeper psychoanalytic readings that tie into our subconscious thoughts. Sen‘s intuitive, free-spirited practice invites viewers into her own personal psyche and streams of consciousness. The complexities of body in its physical, basal, erotic and sexless form features through different works giving importance to bodies’ intelligence and the fetishes it seek. A lot of her works deal with the Self as a matrix of identities- a route taken by Sen to question our social values and to (unmonolith) the exhausted Identity, breaking on its way the accepted norms in our society.
Swinging between distance and intimacy, Mithu makes the private public by engaging the spectators into a game of active voyeurism.
Her works have been shown in many Indian and international museums, biennales and galleries. To name a few, Queens Museum, New York; TATE Modern, London; Albertina museum, Vienna;
S.M.A.K museum, Gent, Belgium; Palais De Tokyo, Paris; Beirut Exhibition Centre, Beirut; Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth; Castelvecchio museum, Verona, Italy; Gaungdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China; Art-Science Museum, Singapore; Dhaka Art Summit; Bozar museum, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels; The Luxe Museum, Singapore; Kastrupgårdsamlingen Museum, Copenhagen; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Art Basel Unlimited, Switzerland; Mediations Biennale, Poznan, Poland; Kochi Muziris Biennale, India; Gallery Continua, France; Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Eastside project space, Birmingham, UK; IVAM, Valencia, Spain; Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi; Kunst Museum,
Berne; Daimler Chrysler collection, Berlin; Brandies University, Boston; Museum of Modern Art (MOMAT) Tokyo; Goethe Institute, Salvador, Brazil; Lausanne Museum, Berne, Switzerland; and SOMA Museum, Seoul.
