Frieze Seoul 2024

In Kingsley Gunatillake's works exists his confrontation with images and sensory responses to the experience of violence, as well as the perpetration of acts of violence. With an art practice that includes painting, installation, illustration, mixed media, sculpture and video art, Sri Lankan born multidisciplinary artist, Kingsley Gunatillake has consistently resisted statist, dominant narratives in circulation of a Sri Lanka at war, and in its post war transitions, in his work. This trajectory of ‘being’ in relation to pain is most powerfully manifested in the form of his book artwork since the 1990s.

The book encountered herein in a multitude of creative interpretations carries its wounds: literal wounds, received in the moment of its making, as well as wounds referenced through signification, borne of a 30-year war. Each book is a narrative of pain and loss. Conceived through the artist’s introspection in response to the burning of the Jaffna Library in Sri Lanka in 1981, this artistic practice of using burning and cutting repeatedly is a meditation: a creative conversation with the book as material and materiality. The book is both an act of remembering, and that of witness. In its evocation of memories of trauma and loss, the book allows for mourning and memorialization (to remember, and to forget) through a complex act of reading through juxtaposition.

Here is also an act of resistive writing. One that destroys text, in order to make and remake meaning, held in the echoes of what has been before, as well as the incoherence of pain. These books, with the shells of the bullets embedded deep within, bear witness to the fact that there is no objective knowing in the narrative of pain; what remains are the shifting sensations of terror and turbulence discerned through the artist’s subjective knowing.

In his canvases and paper works, the artist's expression aims to capture the moment preceding the confrontation of dual images characterized by uncertainty and contradiction. Through a creative exercise, they manipulate these images and structures, which undergo various modifications ranging from hard and rough to soft and delicate. Their joy lies in allowing this process to unfold either through deliberate effort or effortlessly, thereby creating or controlling a situation rather than merely reacting to it after the fact. The resulting paintings, born from this process and adorned with different textures, convey a sense of sexuality stemming from both fervent effort and the natural course of events.