A quiet river runs through Jagath Dheerasekara’s latest exhibition, but it carries weight. Titled a river is a witness, the solo show has opened at Penrith Regional Gallery, marking what the Sri Lankan-born, Picton-based artist believes is the first exhibition by an artist and survivor to centre directly on the southern Sri Lankan uprising between 1987 and 1990.
Those three years remain largely absent from official recognition. Tens of thousands of people disappeared or were killed during a brutal campaign against the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna in the Sinhala-majority south, a period Dheerasekara lived through as a university student who became active in the resistance. “Between 1987 and 1990, Sri Lanka was torn apart by war,” he writes. “The state’s response was ruthless. Fear, killings, and disappearances reached into every village.”
Forced to flee Sri Lanka, Dheerasekara eventually settled in Australia, but his connection to the people and places shaped by that violence has never loosened. The exhibition draws directly on his own experience of surveillance, detention, and escape, as well as decades of research into torture sites and enforced disappearances. In his writing, he recalls bodies floating in rivers and burning on roadside tyre pyres becoming ordinary sights, alongside emergency laws that shielded military and police forces from accountability.
The river, both literal and symbolic, recurs across the works. In Lament of Mahaveli, a new video installation, Dheerasekara reflects on massacres in central Sri Lanka where entire villages were attacked and bodies later surfaced in waterways. Amnesty International documented at least eighty deaths in one such episode, while survivors insist the number was far higher. The artist notes that while he does not assign a single event to the work, floating dead bodies in rivers were common during the 1987 to 1990 period in the south.
Other works confront the mechanics of repression more directly. Seemingly Innocent, first commissioned in 2020, revisits former interrogation centres that have since returned to everyday civic use. Ordinary buildings, and ordinary objects, became tools of torture. “Today, most have reverted to their original use, their walls seemingly clean, bearing no trace of the violence once practised inside,” he writes, describing an erasure that the work refuses to accept.
In his writing, he recalls bodies floating in rivers and burning on roadside tyre pyres becoming ordinary sights, alongside emergency laws that shielded military and police forces from accountability.
That refusal runs through the exhibition. For Dheerasekara, remembering is not an abstract act but a form of resistance. “Three and a half decades on, inquiries and commissions have yielded no justice. Families still wait. Silence persists, and with it the slow death of memory. I resist that erasure,” he writes.
While the show is anchored in personal history, it also speaks to collective absence. European Parliament investigators later recorded that at least 60,000 people disappeared in the south during those years, a figure that made Sri Lanka the highest recorded case handled by the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances at the time. Yet the conflict has never been formally recognised by the Sri Lankan state, and no systematic justice process has followed.
Dheerasekara is currently in Sri Lanka, meeting families of those who died or vanished, recording testimonies while those who remember are still alive. He sees this work as urgent. Memory, he argues, must be archived before it is lost, whether through fear, time, or deliberate forgetting. The exhibition in Penrith forms part of that wider effort, placing stories long pushed to the margins into a public Australian space.
As part of the gallery’s free Summer Open Day on 14 February, Dheerasekara will take part in a public storytelling session, offering further insight into the experiences and research that underpin the work. A river is a witness closes at Penrith Regional Gallery on 15 February.
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