T. Vinoja’s stitched-textile landscapes might come across at first as ordinary maps, but on closer inspection they unravel the violent history of ethnic cleansing and civil war in northern Sri Lanka. The artist was born in 1991 in the district of Kilinochchi, which was carved out of the war-torn Jaffna District in 1984. Kilinochchi fell under the control of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during the civil war that began in 1983 until the Sri Lankan military recaptured the region between 2008 and 2009. Vinoja’s work, embroidered freehand and detailed with patching and darning, directly derives from these events and their aftermath. She enmeshes her own life story with the experiences of people she has met in refugee camps and other sites of displacement, especially those who were disabled, orphaned, or widowed in the genocide committed by members of the Sinhalese majority, often with government support.
Vinoja treats textiles like skin and as archives of memories and scars. Natasha Ginwala, in the exhibition’s press text, sees Vinoja’s art as “a space of shared witnessing, profuse recollections, and cleansing.” Old and damaged clothes are useful for making tents and bunkers, but also for binding wounds or covering the dead. Bunkers—makeshift structures handmade by her father using Borassus leaves, saris, and clay—enabled Vinoja and her family to find refuge and survive as they fled conflict zones; they appear repeatedly in her work. In Bunker & Me, 2022, a stitched human figure, the artist perhaps, finds a moment of rest. Around her, a dense enmeshment of black threads with cross-stitches evokes fences. Whether something is a trap or a shelter depends on how you see it. Sometimes in Vinoja’s works, the accumulations of threads imply geographic features; other times they read as mere lines. In Memories Emerge, 2022, for example, stitches are layered confusingly over each other; slowly, the image—a landscape with figures and coconut palms—reveals itself.
The ink drawing Mullivaikkal, 2019, is titled after the area the artist considers home. We see a landscape filled with elbow crutches—another leitmotif of Vinoja’s—along what looks like a bay. We see debris of homes and personal belongings tightly filling the frame. In her “Differently Able” series, 2016–, we see sutures, patched wounds, and burns representing the permanent afterlife of injuries. Vinoja’s work is about coming to terms with loss and recovering from trauma. The act of stitching, with its meditative repetitive gestures, is a way of coping with these conditions. In one mixed-media drawing, we see forms reminiscent of severed limbs or dead bodies, made using fragments of sari borders and other bits of fabric, on a field with grassy patches and bushes. Vinoja embroiders these patches and torn edges with red threads to signify bleeding. It’s mainly the color that makes it obvious that these are to be seen as gashes and not, for instance, fences.
In Scars, 2021, the only installation in the exhibition, strips of bandages dangled from the doorframe situated between the gallery’s two rooms. As people passed through, the bandages fell into place and aligned to depict silhouettes of people, bunkers, and boats. The bottom edges of the fabric strips are soaked red, suggesting severed limbs, dripping with blood. This passage espoused the essence of the show: a looming history that we constantly return to and pass through, but can never truly overcome.
— Mario D’Souza
