• Ajantha Ranaweera on reimagining the travelling palaces of Sri Lankan kings to explore authority and society, and his search for a modern Sri Lankan visual language

What makes art Sri Lankan? It is a question with no simple answer. 

Sri Lanka has an extraordinarily rich visual history, shaped across centuries by painting, sculpture, architecture, textiles, craft, ritual, and performance. Yet defining a contemporary Sri Lankan artistic identity is considerably more complicated. The country’s artists work within a visual landscape shaped by these older traditions, but also by colonialism, globalisation, Western art education, and the international contemporary art world.

For modern and contemporary Sri Lankan artists, this creates an interesting question of where to look when developing a visual language of their own. Is Sri Lankan identity found in subject matter and in recognisable motifs and imagery, or does it sit deeper, within the aesthetic systems, cultural knowledge, and ways of seeing that have developed here and across the region?

For architect and artist Ajantha Ranaweera, the answer lies less in reproducing recognisable traditions and more in understanding the visual and intellectual systems behind them, and then finding ways to reinterpret them for the present. His latest exhibition, Gaman Māligā, is part of this continuing search for a modern Sri Lankan visual language.

“If you’re going to create a global product, there’s no way other than to look within. I have always found that that’s what gives me my edge,” he said. This search sits at the heart of his latest body of work, Gaman Māligā, where an old structure of Sri Lankan kingship becomes the starting point for a much larger exploration of power, society, and identity.

For Ranaweera, who moves between architecture, art, and design with little interest in separating one discipline from another, the exhibition is built through three interconnected areas: its subject matter, the technique through which its world is constructed, and the theoretical foundation underpinning it.

Together, they form another step in what he describes as his own “creative hunt” for a modern Sri Lankan identity.

Power on the move

The starting point for Gaman Māligā came through anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere’s ‘The Doomed King,’ where Ranaweera encountered the idea of the gaman māligāva, or travelling palace.

Historically, the gaman māligāva was a temporary structure established for the king as he travelled through different parts of the kingdom. Rather than simply providing accommodation, these travelling royal complexes extended the machinery and symbolism of the court into the provinces.

For Ranaweera, what became interesting was the social and political structure surrounding this movement. “The whole thing about it is that it’s a sociopolitical power structure that connects with the people,” he explained. “There is a methodology and there are layers of society connected with this ultimate power.”

The travelling court became a means of governance, but also a means of projecting authority. The king and everything surrounding him moved into a community, heard grievances, asserted control, and presented the power of the state directly to its people.

Ranaweera offered a contemporary way of thinking about the idea: imagine Parliament itself moving around Sri Lanka, governing from place to place, meeting communities, exploring their problems, and attempting to resolve them.

The historical gaman māligāva itself contained different areas, including the garrison, the king’s space, and the audience chamber. These divisions also gave Ranaweera a framework through which to consider the different layers surrounding power.

What interests him is less whether authority itself is inherently good or bad, and more what happens when different people encounter it.

Some see authority as protective. Others experience the same structure as restrictive. Some align themselves with power, while others resist it. Social groups respond to authority and to one another, and those relationships continually shift.

“The interesting thing is to see the layers of society and power structures and how they perceive authority,” Ranaweera said.

That gives Gaman Māligā a contemporary resonance without tying the exhibition to one particular political moment. Its subject is the larger relationship between people and systems of power, and how dramatically that relationship changes depending on where one stands.

A celestial Sri Lanka

The historical structure is transformed considerably within Ranaweera’s visual world.

His Gaman Māligā travels through a celestial garden, an imagined Sri Lanka presented as a paradise. Within it are birds carrying structures and figures, buildings that appear almost jewel-like, and groups of boys moving through a fantastical landscape.

The imagery has an immediate sense of whimsy, but underneath lies a more complicated social world.

Ranaweera described the birds as carriers. Much like the dola, or palanquin, which physically elevated and transported figures of importance, these carriers become part of the language of authority. Those being carried hold power and, through that power, influence the narratives unfolding around them.

Look beyond the playfulness of the celestial garden and the relationships become more apparent. “There are multiple layers within it. You see the whole sociopolitical dynamic,” he said.

Much of what appears fantastical has been constructed from recognisable Sri Lankan and regional visual traditions. Colour, for instance, has been extensively drawn from regional textiles. Ranaweera studied fabrics and sarees from different parts of Sri Lanka and India, decoding their colour combinations and then applying them in entirely different contexts within his paintings.

The process is central to his attempt to create something contemporary without making Western art traditions his primary reference point. “I’m looking at our traditional fabric, from Jaffna to Kandy and India, and trying to decode the colour combinations and feelings of that, make it modern, and apply it within the painting,” he explained.

Figures similarly draw from temple murals, but are pushed into new forms. Southern Sri Lankan healing rituals and dance traditions, including Thelme, inform their clothing and gestures. Ranaweera likened the resulting costumes to the “spacesuits” worn by the boys as they navigated his celestial landscape.

Jewellery, or abharana, carries another layer of meaning. Rather than functioning simply as decoration, different forms and quantities of jewellery become indicators of identity, community, status, and authority.

This interest in abharana is also beginning to point towards another body of work Ranaweera is developing, extending his investigation into how material culture communicates social identity.

Even the architecture within Gaman Māligā is treated similarly. Historic architectural forms are present, but they have been transformed, patterned, and ornamented until they belong to the same celestial world as the figures and birds surrounding them.

Finding theory closer to home

Beneath both the subject and the visual language of Gaman Māligā is another element that has become central to Ranaweera’s practice: rasa theory.

The aesthetic theory has its foundations in Bharata Muni’s ‘Natyashastra,’ generally dated to around the early centuries BCE and CE. Initially associated particularly with performance, it identified eight principal rasas, or aesthetic experiences, with a ninth later developed within the tradition.

For Ranaweera, its importance lies in the relationship between aesthetics and feeling. Rather than reaching automatically for a European theoretical framework to explain work grounded in Sri Lankan and South Asian experience, he found rasa provided a system developed within the cultural region from which his own work emerges. 

“It decodes a lot of things,” he said. “It’s easier when I use that theory and apply it to my works rather than trying to use a Euro theory that was never really made for our context.”

This has practical implications for how he creates. If an artwork is intended to produce a feeling in its audience, Ranaweera asks what creates that response. It might come through manipulating colour, introducing a familiar shape in an unfamiliar context, or taking colour combinations people encounter in everyday life and applying them to something entirely different.

Gaman Māligā consequently operates through recognition and disruption. A viewer might recognise a colour relationship from a saree, the outline of a figure from a temple mural, the movement of a ritual performer, a piece of jewellery, or an architectural form. None is reproduced literally.

Instead, fragments of cultural memory are rearranged. For Ranaweera, returning to rasa also raises questions around what knowledge has been privileged within contemporary art and design. Here is an aesthetic tradition stretching back roughly two millennia, yet language, colonial histories, and the dominance of other intellectual traditions have affected how readily such regional frameworks are accessed and applied today.

Building a modern Sri Lankan identity

This is ultimately where Gaman Māligā becomes part of something larger than one exhibition.

Ranaweera is interested in what happens when contemporary Sri Lankan creatives begin with the systems already around them, not to preserve those systems unchanged, but to understand, decode, and develop them.

For him, those possibilities also extend far beyond painting. “What is also unique for me, and I don’t know if it’s good or bad, is that I don’t see boundaries between art, architecture, interior design, fashion, and fabric. They’re all intertwined.”

His architectural training is visible in the constructed environments of his paintings. Textile research informs colour. Ritual influences movement and costume. Jewellery communicates hierarchy. A regional aesthetic theory provides the intellectual framework tying emotion to visual form.

The same research has already moved into fabric and design projects, with Ranaweera interested in applying what he learns through art across the wider creative industries. The result is less a declaration of what modern Sri Lankan art should look like than an ongoing attempt to find out.

For Ranaweera, creating a modern Sri Lankan identity does not mean choosing between tradition and modernity. His approach is to pull apart the visual and intellectual systems inherited from the region, understand what sits beneath them, and then ask what they might become now.

Gaman Māligā does this through an old travelling palace moving across an imagined celestial Sri Lanka. Around it, societies gather, power shifts, identities form, and people respond differently to the authority passing through their world.

The historical structure might belong to another time, but the negotiation surrounding it feels distinctly contemporary. And within that movement, Ranaweera continues his own search for a visual lainguage that is modern, globally engaged, and unmistakably rooted here.