Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah

Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah was born in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Art and Design (sculpture) at the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka (2016), and he completed an online course “Public Art Practice in Place-Shaping,” conducted by Mariam Dawood School of Visual Arts and Design at Beaconhouse National University (BNU), Lahore, Pakistan (2020). He teaches Sculpture and Drawing at the Swami Vipulananda Institute of Aesthetic Studies, Eastern University, Sri Lanka. He is an emerging artist working on numerous collaborations with local Sri Lankan and international artists.

Rupaneethan’s practice is the result of his observations on human-made interweaving of relationships created by electrical and telephone wires crisscrossing land and country—linking paddy fields, gardens, forests, hills, huts, houses, apartments, public buildings, monuments, towers, churches, mosques, temples, stupas, islands, ponds, rivers, and lagoons for instance. Of his work he says that in the decade since the civil war has ended, such infrastructural connections have increased exponentially. At the same time, and as a partial consequence of ever greater human connectivity, natural forests have been significantly destroyed.
His works take on landscapes and land-based conflicts, alongside the construction of identity in Sri Lanka. For Tonight No Poetry Will Serve Rupaneethan offers a small series of paintings depicting landscapes as embodiment of caste, class, race, and religious identities of people. They are akin to idiosyncratic explorations on how landscapes can offer space for difference and interdependency between people, and the possibility for collective identity where connections can be forged across borders and divisions.

Rupaneethan’s recent exhibitions include In Search for Connectivity, Paradise Road Galleries, Colombo (2021), Extending Space of the Palace, 9th URONTO Art Residential Exchange Programme, Dubolhati Rajabari, Naogaon, BD (2019), Connectivity and Reflexivity of Nature and Me, Celebrate Colombo-One Won Exhibition, The Stables, Park Street Mews, Colombo (2019), My Inner Land, A Timeless Heritage, Tolworth Recreation Centre, Fullers Way North, UK (2019), Identity: Being and Becoming, Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo (2018), Mother Land, (a collaboration with students), Re-Evolution, Colomboscope, Colombo (2017) and Painting and Sculpture, Science Navigators, Government Teachers Training College, Batticaloa (2015).

Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah’s latest work will be presented at the forthcoming edition of Colomboscope in 2022. He lives and works in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka.

I am excited to participate in this exhibition because, on the one hand, to me, helping other human beings makes a spiritual experience, and this exhibition motivates me in that manner. And on the other hand, as an emerging artist, I am really into displaying my works among prominent artists and learning things through this experience.