This exhibition brings together the work of four university-trained contemporary artists who engage with Kolam through both individual and collective practices. Their approach traverses the imagined boundaries between art and craft—challenging conventional distinctions through diverse materials, techniques, and conceptual frameworks.
The art–craft divide is not merely an aesthetic distinction but a deeply political one—shaped by conditions of modernity, colonial legacies, nationalist aspirations, institutional mediations, state and non-state initiatives and ongoing struggles over cultural value and representation. Challenging this binary opens up possibilities for more inclusive and ethically grounded understandings of artistic practice.
By foregrounding the subjectivity of the makers, the exhibition explores how creativity and novelty can simultaneously connect and disrupt established categories. Drawing from both traditional and contemporary cultural vocabularies, the artists layer personal memories and narratives across multiple mediums in playful, experimental ways.
Working across diverse materials and methods—both individually and collectively, for expressive and everyday purposes—the Kolam artists continually seek interconnections, interdependence, and crossovers between imagined categories of art, craft, and design. They transfer knowledge, skills, and sensibilities from one domain to another, cultivating a fluid and reciprocal approach to making.
Through this engagement, they come to understand art and craft not as opposites, but as distinct yet complementary realms of possibility—each offering its own modes of expression, ethics, and aesthetic inquiry. Through this dialogic interplay, Kolam becomes not only a visual motif but a site of inquiry—where aesthetic form, cultural transmission, and embodied knowledge converge.
Curated by T. Shanaathanan
(T.Shanathanan is a visual artist and a Professor of Art History, Department of Fine Arts, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. He is one of the co-founders of Sri Lankan Archive for Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design in Jaffna and founder of Kolam craft initiative.)
