Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah

Biography

Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah (b. 1989, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka) is a multimedia artist whose practice ranges from installations to performance-based soundscapes, videos, and drawings. His work focuses on the destructive impact of Sri Lanka’s prolonged civil war, its effects on the ecological world and on the lives of people existing amidst the ceaseless violence and trauma. Using motifs such as mycelium, reminiscent of the damaging wounds inflicted on nature, while reflecting on how land becomes the bearer of the vestiges of war, Pakkiyarajah’s work explores how nature is rendered vulnerable due to human actions and offers a lens into how they are inextricably linked to each other. Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah completed his BFA in Art & Design at the University of Jaffna, and completed his MFA in Studio Art as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He is a multidisciplinary artist and a senior lecturer in the visual arts at SVIAS, Eastern University, in Sri Lanka, teaching courses on painting, drawing, and mixed media. Select solo and group exhibitions include No Race No Colour, Experimenter – Colaba, Mumbai and Experimenter - Ballygunge Place, Kolkata (2025), We Will See, Experimenter – Colaba, Mumbai (2024); Titen: Embodied Knowledge, Shifting Grounds, 17th Biennale Jogja; Thinking Historically in the Present (2023), 15th Sharjah Biennial (2023). Straddling Ocean and Sky, Brief Histories Gallery, New York (2023), among others.