Curator’s Note

Rajni Perera’s Mosquito Net series summons a twilight world where the sacred, the speculative, and the survivant converge. Created on cotton rag and polyester substrates with materials ranging from acrylic gouache to polymer clay beads and metallic thread, these portraits do more than depict: they invoke.

Drawing from Sayem Khan’s illuminating essay on the series, we understand this work as a refusal: a refusal to let colonial erasures dictate memory, and a refusal to separate the spiritual from the political. The figures in Mosquito Net echo the ritual architectures of Yaku Tovil ceremonies in Sri Lanka, not as static folklore, but as living technologies of protection, trance, and resistance.

The twilight that saturates these compositions is not merely atmospheric, it is temporal, ancestral, a threshold. As Khan writes, this is the “sacred time of dusk” when spirit and human realms blur, and when the unseen is most potent. Perera’s figures, masked, cloaked, or entwined in serpentine and botanical codes, move through this liminal hour with intent. They are avatars of sovereignty. They are kin to exorcists, deities, and dreamers.

With each stitch, each gesture, Perera reclaims the archive, not to restore it, but to remake it. Her portraits don’t ask who we were; they demand who we are becoming.

This note was written in dialogue with and in homage to Sayem Khan’s critical commentary on Perera’s Mosquito Net series.