Artist's Statement

Kesara Ratnavibhushana (b. 1983) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sri Lanka. His father, Anura, a lifelong protege and confidante of Geoffrey Bawa, surrounded Kesara with architectural theory and design including Tropical Modernism. Initially, Kesara preferred otherworldly dreamscapes in pen & ink, watercolour and acrylic but, in time, he sought the extraordinary within the familiar.     

Central to his oeuvre is the integration of Eastern spirituality’s five elements: Water, Earth, Air, Fire, and Space. Will to Power (2005 -2025) is a retrospective meditation on life - an attempt to distill reality / observed universe - and a profound exploration and unification of Kesara’s Eastern and Western creative and intellectual influences. The collection subverts natural and man-made worlds, transforming unfinished buildings to emblems and plants to provisory relics. Saturation, monochrome hue, exuberant tessellation, juxtaposition and inversion define his aesthetic style. The found object appears often, mirroring mundaneity and spontaneity in his professional photographic practice. Kesara frames his subjects with candor and vulnerability, rendering them at compact to massive scales. 

During his 2003–2008 London tenure, Kesara found his maturity as Shunt Collective’s Photographer-in-Residence and liberated his lens to capture the profound beauty in the overlooked. He developed a way of seeing that reframed and respected the unregarded or taboo, while elevating the numinous as in his ongoing works Body is… , Agni (Fire - Within), Love & Lust in the Time of Dengue & the ‘Rona (and its conceptual distillation OPO1927). 

Kesara transcends the traditional bounds of photography, working with video, textile and sculpture. His ongoing collaboration with artist Prasanna Jayatilaka on multiple works (Prototype Blue, Agni, Passionate Dimensions) manifests the duo’s work in three dimensions through sculptural elements.  In 2021, Kesara curated Sri Lanka’s first ‘phygital’ NFT exhibition, The Brilliant Resilient (2022), which assembled fifteen artists leveraging blockchain to reflect on the Sri Lankan socio-economic crisis. He is also the curatorial consultant for  70 Years & 70 Faces (2026), an exhibition for the Swiss Embassy in Sri Lanka. 

Developed while on a reportage assignment for Rolex SA, The Garden of Perfumed Delight (2021) is a parallel, aesthetic exploration of Sri Lanka’s rich flora and fauna as a revelatory confrontation between desolation and abundance, human encroachment and habitat survival amidst the dwindling of time. This work connects and contrasts with Healing State: Colomboscope (2017),  which elevates Ayurveda through botanical macro-photography.

 Kesara’s multidisciplinary work invites viewers to join as co-conspirators with his lens.  Equally seduced and challenged, we dare not turn away. This tension presents a rare gift: the essentiality of our lived human experience. 

 

MY WORK IS A MEDITATION ON LIVED EXPERIENCE. 

HUMAN IDENTITY - AND A SEARCH FOR A MEANING FOR EXISTENCE

I OFTEN SUBVERT THE MEDIUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY TO CREATE A DEEPLY PERSONAL RECORD UNDERPINNED BY A SPIRITUAL ETHOS.