Sri Lanka-based artist Vinoja Tharmalingam presents haunting bunker installations and textile works at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, mapping the trauma of three decades of civil war in northern Sri Lanka.
About the Installation
At Island Warehouse on Willingdon Island, Kochi, Vinoja Tharmalingam’s immersive installations confront visitors with the raw weight of war-torn survival. Her two interconnected bodies of work — My Last Breath with All My Burdens (2025) and A Land Woven with the Threads of Memories (2025) reconstruct the lived experience of Mullaitivu’s displaced communities during Sri Lanka’s civil war. The works remain on view as part of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale until 31 March.
The Artworks
Tharmalingam rebuilds the physical logic of wartime survival through found and sourced materials. A tilted boat resting atop another sits on a sand-laden floor — a vessel for fishing that doubles as a bunker when danger arrives. A tractor trolley stacked with paddy sacks, grains spilling from the seams, shelters a dug-out space screened by hand-filled sandbags and saris. A third structure uses long palmyra palm stumps arranged in rows to form the dark, roofless walls of a makeshift shelter.
“Life was literally a journey in darkness, moving from one bunker to another,” Tharmalingam says. “People hid whenever sounds were heard and stealthily came out to cook in the open.”
Artist Practice
Tharmalingam works in felting, weaving, and embroidery — skills she first learnt from her mother in a community where women routinely patched and sewed. Her textile series draws on Namda, the hand-felting tradition common to Pakistan and Kashmir, but subverts it by weaving in bandages, human hair, fabric, rope, and fibre in place of wool and cotton. The resulting rugs function as aerial maps of a devastated landscape — forests, hospitals, schools, and homes collapsing alongside the lives they once contained.
“It is a second skin, a mute witness to the bleak realities in bunkers in Jaffna and refugee camps in India — a call against forgetting,” she explains.
Key Themes
The Sri Lankan Civil War, which lasted nearly three decades, culminated in the Mullivaikkal massacre of 2009, in which an estimated one lakh people were killed. Tharmalingam’s work at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale insists that demining the land does not demine the mind. Loss, abduction, abandonment, displacement, and poisoned environments course through every material choice. She draws deliberate parallels between Mullaitivu and Kochi — both coastal landscapes shaped by fishing, lagoons, and the shared colonial histories of Portuguese, Dutch, and British rule — arguing that the geography of suffering is never wholly foreign.
“Art is a mapping of injustices and erasure — a call for harmony, non-violence, and a kind of cleansing and healing,” she says.
Exhibition Details
- Works: My Last Breath with All My Burdens (2025); A Land Woven with the Threads of Memories (2025)
- Artist: Vinoja Tharmalingam
- Venue: Island Warehouse, Willingdon Island, Kochi-Muziris Biennale
- On view until: 31 March 2026
This article has been created from the press kit shared with Abir Pothi. For press releases and related queries, write to editor@abirpothi.com.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
