Curator’s Note

“We are the daughters of our mothers’ nightmares, and the dreamers of our daughters’ dreams.”
— Genny Lim, Wonder Woman (1981)

In Wonder Woman, Rajni Perera fractures the archetype of the heroine and reconstructs hers, limb by limb, gesture by gesture, through a diasporic lens steeped in mythology, memory, and survival. These figures are not clad in capes nor armed with golden lassos, but wrapped in serpentine spirals, masked in ancestral motifs, and poised in ritualized movement. Perera’s protagonists are vessels of plural selves: women forged in the slipstreams of empire, migration, and resistance.

The series, first exhibited as part of Wonder Women at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, becomes a visual chorus in response to Genny Lim’s poem of the same name. In both, the viewer is asked to wonder: do they see me? Do I see them? The “them” is not static; she is intergenerational, oceanic, and speculative. Perera’s figures emerge from textured silhouettes, their bodies collaged with iconography drawn from South Asian aesthetics, global futurisms, and personal cosmologies. The snake, ever-present, coils like a lineage, marking cycles of renewal, power, and knowledge.

These works do not flatten identity into symbol. Rather, they throb with contradictions: feral and poised, tender and armored, fractured and whole. As Kathy Huang noted, figuration in this context is not merely form, it is self-determination. In Perera’s hands, the body is not object but sovereign terrain, capable of holding centuries of loss and light.

This is not the Wonder Woman of Western comic lore. She is older, deeper, and more difficult. She carries her own myth.