Watch Now: Muhanned Cader
b. 1966, Colombo, Sri Lanka; lives and works in Galle, Sri Lanka
b. 1966, Colombo, Sri Lanka; lives and works in Galle, Sri Lanka
Presenting with Jhaveri Contemporary at Frieze London 2022 as part of Indra's Net, curated by Sandhini Poddar
Engaged with traditional modes of landscape painting, Sri Lankan artist Muhanned Cader approaches this timeless medium with experimentation, interrogation and poesy. Based in the southern, coastal town of Galle, Cader belongs to a generation of artists — known art historically as the ‘90’s Trend — who witnessed Sri Lanka’s Civil War from 1983 to 2009 through a critical lens.
His practice, although not overtly activist in nature, subtly questions the extractive capitalism of Sri Lanka’s current government. Looking to the inland forests and the southern Indian Ocean for inspiration, Cader’s collages, drawings and paintings abstract these sites through their unique shapes and perspectival vignettes. Playing with the relationship of part to whole, Cader’s works are cinematic in nature.
For Frieze London, Cader uses author Leonard Woolf ’s book, ‘The Village in the Jungle’ (1913), as a catalyst and situates his suite of artworks in the rocky, forested Yala National Park, which continues to be threatened by overdevelopment.
About Indra's Net
Derived from ancient Buddhist and Hindu thought forms, Indra’s Net refers to an ethics of being, where an individual atom holds within it the structure of reality. Imagine a vast bejewelled net: at every nexus there is
a reflective orb that mirrors and refracts every other orb in its entirety. Each part is held within the whole in a system of dependent origination. All sentient life is interconnected; shifts to one atom subtly alter the rest.
Curated by Sandhini Poddar, this group presentation brings together leading international artists whose practices are informed by this prescient metaphor. In various media, we learn of ancestry, history, language, consciousness and futurity as being bound to the earth, which serves as a perennial witness through the arc of time.
In the video above, Cader shares his response to the question, 'What does interconnectedness mean to you?', an enquiry which is at the heart of the section.
