Take a Chill Pill: Group Exhibition

Anoli Perera’s practice is situated within critical feminist discourse, engaging with themes of identity, history, myth, and postcolonial anxiety. Her work examines how personal memory intersects with broader socio political narratives, particularly through the lens of women lived experience. In her Doll Series and Doll House Series, nostalgia is constructed as a fragmented and a temporal space, where disjointed memories are reassembled into an uncanny visual field. This imagined terrain reflects both longing and estrangement, questioning whether nostalgia functions as escape or entrapment within a constructed past.

Iromie Wijewardena’s practice centers on the representation of the female form, drawing from the lived realities of everyday women vendors, dancers, artisans, and laborers who often serve as primary providers for their families. Her work foreground’s themes of resilience, dignity, and visibility, engaging with the socio-cultural conditions that render women’s labor both essential and overlooked. Through her visual language, 

The artist’s practice investigates paradoxes of masculinity through the manipulation, adornment, and redefinition of the male human form. Central to this body of work is a critical engagement with Bushido: The Way of the Samurai, where disciplined martial rigor coexisted with refined artistic cultivation. The work reflects on this duality strength and restraint, violence and sensitivity positioning masculinity as a constructed and contradictory condition. Drawing from East Asian aesthetics, the work references blue and white porcelain traditions, kintsugi philosophies of repair, and forms of body adornment to articulate shifting interpretations of identity and gendered roles. 

The artist’s practice is grounded in printmaking as a reflective and embodied process through which themes of femininity, freedom, identity, and emotional transformation are explored. Central to her work is an autobiographical engagement with lived experience, particularly the psychological and social shifts that have shaped her understanding of selfhood. Marriage is positioned as a significant turning point in her narrative, marking a transition from restriction toward a sense of emotional, social, and creative liberation. This shift informs her visual vocabulary, where symbolic forms such as male and female figures, fish, and Heliconia flowers operate as metaphors for desire, sexuality, love, endurance, and growth. 

Engaging with skin as both a physical surface and a socially constructed boundary through which notions of identity, beauty, and belonging are negotiated. The series Shades of Identity critically addresses colorism and the enduring impact of colonial histories that continue to shape perceptions of skin tone in contemporary society. It examines how lighter skin is often privileged while darker tones are marginalized, revealing persistent hierarchies embedded within cultural consciousness. Focusing primarily on female subjects, including self-representation, she highlights how women carry the burden of these imposed beauty standards, exposing tensions between visibility, value, and exclusion. 

The artist’s practice is grounded in studio ceramics, engaging with childhood, memory, culture, and religion as socially constructed systems that shape human experience. Her work reflects on the gendered conditions of labor and rest, questioning how value and worth are assigned within contemporary society. In this work, she asks, “When was the last time you’ve seen a woman truly at rest?” A vacant lounging chair becomes a central metaphor for absence and denial, while surrounding elements subtly question the possibility of rest for women, suggesting it is often conditional and burdened by unseen costs. 

Through constructed visual narratives and character driven worlds, the artist reimagines everyday life as an alternative reality. Her practice moves fluidly between art, design, storytelling, and merchandise, centering on the ongoing BORN SERIES, which reconstructs Colombo through fragments of memory, observation, and imagination. This body of work explores perception, identity, and emotional escapism, positioning storytelling as a method of reshaping the familiar into something layered and open ended. Ambiguity is a key strategy within her practice, allowing characters and scenes to remain fluid and adaptable, encouraging viewers to form their own interpretations and emotional connections.

The artist’s practice engages with fragility, resilience, and processes of self-reconstruction, reflecting on personal and socio political instability. Her work considers how individuals navigate collapse, uncertainty, and renewal, forming meaning through lived experience. Alongside this, she explores singlehood as a space of autonomy and  self-acceptance, challenging dominant social narratives around marriage and relationships and reframing it as a conscious and valid mode of living.  

Her practice is rooted in process-based methodologies where repetition, material intervention, and embodied action are central. Working primarily on wood, she employs carving, burning, scraping, and painting to activate the surface as both support and expressive field. These tactile processes generate layered textures that reflect emotional states and cycles of transformation, positioning materiality as a mirror of psychological endurance.  

Menstruation lies at the center of the artist’s practice, where painting becomes a language for articulating experiences that are often silenced or socially constrained. This body of work critically examines menstruation as both a biological process and a socio cultural condition, shaped by stigma, limited education, and unequal access to knowledge in many Asian contexts. Rather than treating it as a purely physical occurrence, she frames it as a lived experience shaped by cultural control, gendered expectations, and systemic invisibility. Her work reflects on the emotional and social weight carried by women, while also acknowledging resilience, adaptation, and everyday acts of endurance. 

Objects become vessels of memory, faith, and inheritance within the artist’s practice, where still life painting constructs layered narratives of lived experience. Drawing from her upbringing in a devout Muslim household, she transforms devotional and everyday objects such as prayer mats, patterned textiles, tasbih beads, and pomegranates into symbolic forms that reflect domestic intimacy, spirituality, and cultural belonging. Working primarily in oil paint, she approaches still life as a contemplative space where objects assume human presence, allowing each composition to function as a quiet self-portrait.