Rajni Perera’s Traveller series transports us to a speculative timeline where the future folds into the past and the diasporic figure is not displaced, but ascendant. Here, survival is not simply an act of endurance but an aesthetic evolution, flourishing under pressure, adapting in form, myth, and ritual.

The Travellers move through hostile terrains, both planetary and political, cloaked in ancestral armor. Their garments are not mere fabric but temporal membranes: crafted over centuries, stitched with knowledge systems, devotion, resistance. These vestments are equal parts defense and declaration, ceremonial and tactical, embodying care as strategy, survival as art. In Perera’s hands, pattern becomes code, adornment becomes inheritance, and the body becomes archive.

There is a prophetic tenderness here. The Travellers, bearing luminous skin, cosmological textiles, and talismanic limbs, recall the mutated blossoms of Fukushima: flawed, radiant, reborn. Their presence gestures toward a mythic convergence, a return to a state that is both beyond and before us.

In Traveller, Perera reclaims the diasporic figure from narratives of exile and rootlessness, and instead renders them as emissaries of futurity: carriers of culture, sovereignty, and imaginative power. They are not lost. They are becoming.

This curator’s note draws on and is indebted to Negarra A Kudumu’s essay accompanying the exhibition at Patel-Division Projects.