Every piece that you see here is handmade,” says Sri Lanka-born artist Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, as he ushers a select few into Mumbai’s Jhaveri Contemporary. For his ambitious new show, Of Dreaming and Remembering, he has transformed the gallery space to echo his Sydney studio—its creative chaos, its tranquil order, and the liminal cradle he calls a “parallel reality.”
His signature idol-like figures—from the mysteriously monstrous to the sublime—fill the gallery’s two rooms, as do paintings he has made on locally sourced tarpaulin sheets. Presently living in Australia, he has worked with materials ranging from bronze and clay to wood and found objects, which he relies on for their “randomness and surprise.”
At the heart of the exhibition lies a paradoxical question: can objects be at once archaeological and future-forward? As the title suggests, Nithiyendran urges us to remember that duality extends not only to inanimate, prehistoric objects but equally to humans as well.
“Human memory is fascinating, though fickle and often unreliable, whereas no one has seen the future yet. In this show, I wanted to invent a speculative future while also invoking the past. As a diasporic artist, the spiritual and emotional conflict is fundamental to my identity,” says Nithiyendran, whose work focuses on selfhood, identity, gender, and globalisation, with themes drawn from queer aesthetics and pop culture.
Most of Nithiyendran’s works are autobiographical, walking a fine line between being unabashedly celebratory and distinctly dystopian. But nothing embodies that sense of metafiction better than Self Portrait with Vessels and Shards. For this quirky self-portrait, the 36-year-old artist used a digitally rendered 3D scan of his own face and cast it in bronze.
As a playful afterthought, he pegged a plastic dinosaur toy to another sculpture — perhaps, a reminder that historical techniques like wheel-thrown clay and lost-wax bronze casting that artists like him have long championed could well become extinct unless we revive and reimagine them in the age of AI creativity.
He has also experimented with Sgraffito this time, a primitive Greek pottery technique that involves applying clay and colour before scratching back to reveal the intricate patterns and drawings hidden beneath. “It’s essentially a form of carving,” he says, “My process is extremely sculptural and tactile. Almost all the works in the show are performative and painterly.”
Nithiyendran is primarily known for his assemblages of figurative totems, which simultaneously brood over and revel in their “mythological playground.” But Of Dreaming and Remembering feels like a radical departure from his distinctive dreamworld, often populated with new-age subversions of deities and demons. Much of the show charts his growing obsession with the vessel, a humble everyday treasure which he describes as a gateway to a shared South Asian cultural heritage.
Vessels and pots serve as more than just motifs in his methodology. They function almost like blank canvases bearing historical and philosophical traces of traditions. “I have always been curious about the role of vessels as archaeological objects throughout history. Vessels are deeply embedded in various parts of South Asia. People eat and drink from them, but they are also used for rituals, so it becomes an enduring metaphor for spirituality and faith,” he muses.
“For instance, ancient Tamil burial urns are common across both India and Sri Lanka. It’s beautiful and terrifying at the same time to think that something as nondescript as an urn might be carrying ashes of a departed soul for eternity.”
Once branded the “bad boy of ceramics” by CNN, Nithiyendran’s continuously evolving identity is shaped by his mixed ancestry. Born to a Tamil father and a Dutch Burgher mother, Nithiyendran was only one when his parents immigrated to Australia in 1989 as political refugees from Sri Lanka.
He recalls growing up in a refugee bubble, far away from the conservative white Australian society. While he’s a globally celebrated name today, there was a time a decade ago when he faced what he calls “kickback” by some sections of the ceramics community of his home country.
Nithiyendran’s art is eccentric but complex, where hybridity assumes a dichotomy between vulnerability and power. This is also the reason that the word ‘hybrid’ inspires him in a way few things do.
“If we are thinking about nature and culture, I always feel that most things that involve a mixing of different materials are a natural, default position—this includes humans as well,” he remarks, lost in a magical world of his own creation.
The story is reported by Shaikh Ayaz of The New Indian Express.