The Mahaveli River, the longest waterway in Sri Lanka, moves here in a quiet, constant motion. But it is a deceptive calm. The image of tranquillity is interrupted by the ripples in the current and by the water’s edge, which reveals faint human profiles emerging from the paradisical, rhythmic flow of water. Resurfacing echoes of those who, according to the state-sanctioned narrative, ‘disappeared’ following a massacre on the banks of the Mahaveli in 1989…

… erased into silence by fear and the river’s current.

Presented as a video installation, Lament of Mahaveli depicts the river as a dual site of serenity and sorrow, a notion that is all the more resonant as the perennial Yandhai/Nepean River, with its own memories of historical violence, flows opposite the Lewers House Gallery. The river here becomes a metaphor and a method for the continual submerging, uncovering, revealing of memory. Constantly charged and able to wash away, the river emerges as a site of remembrance, carrying and resurfacing sediment in time. That which seemingly disappears beneath the surface persists, disguised by the reflections and refractions of water.

Lament of Mahaveli does not merely represent the past, it presses it into a living body, into matter. The Mahaveli, then, becomes a silent witness to violence and decimation, a quiet archive of what official histories sought to conceal. Memory is forged into a coursing current that persists from the past to the present moment, countering practices of imposed, manufactured forgetting. Through this subtle yet haunting animation, Dheerasekara allows the Mahaveli to testify to its own histories. The timeless, melancholic current of water refuses to forget. A river is a witness and, by becoming part of its lament, we too share in the re-memory of histories to challenge the forces that seek to bury them. (Text: Tia Madden)

Made in collaboration with Lorand Golebiowski.

Commissioned by Penrith Regional Gallery.