History books rarely mention what happened in Sri Lanka during the Southern People’s Uprising of 1987 to 1990. For those who lived through it, the memory remains vivid, painful, and mostly undocumented. For Jagath Dheerasekara, the memory is more than personal, it is the foundation of his artistic practice. Forced to flee his homeland in the early 1990s due to political and human rights activism, Dheerasekara has spent decades tracing the residue of loss, resistance, and exile. His upcoming solo exhibition a river is a witness, opening at Penrith Regional Gallery’s Lewers House this November, continues that quiet but unflinching work.
The title is no metaphor of convenience. In Dheerasekara’s hands, the river becomes both symbol and evidence, a living archive that carries memory forward even when people cannot. “The river emerges as a powerful metaphor,” notes the gallery. “It, too, an archive and a repository. Of something that courses, unceasing, through past and present, from generation to generation.”
Running from 8 November 2025 to 15 February 2026, the exhibition gathers works that do not scream but insist. These are not documents in the bureaucratic sense. They are fragments, textures, and traces, a counter-archive to official erasure. Dheerasekara’s work does not present a clean record of events. It catalogues what remains when silence is imposed: scar, residue, memory passed between people rather than captured in print.
According to the gallery, “events of that period remain largely undocumented. Obscured in—and at times, completely erased from—official history records, silenced in public discourse, and left unspoken by many who lived through it. But memory, too, leaves a trace.” The artist embraces the quiet and the partial. His archive is not made of declarations, but of testimonies offered in gesture, in material, in witness.
The exhibition is deeply personal but offers a collective provocation. It is a call to resist forgetting, not just of one moment or region, but of the many places where history is shaped by what it omits. It asks viewers to consider what gets left out, who gets pushed aside, and how power survives through silence.
Dheerasekara himself is no stranger to being silenced. After fleeing Sri Lanka, he was granted asylum in France and did not return to his homeland until the mid-1990s. Since moving to Australia in 2008, he has lived on Gundungarra Country in Western Sydney and built a career marked by quiet intensity and moral clarity. He has received grants from Creative Australia and Amnesty International and shown work across Australia in institutions such as the Museum of Australian Photography, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and the State Library of New South Wales.
The exhibition will be held at Lewers House, Penrith Regional Gallery, with an opening event on 15 November from 6 to 8 pm and an open day scheduled for 14 February 2026. It is not framed as a memorial. It is a demand: I remember.
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