The politically charged Postmodernist turn in Sri Lankan art that began in the 1990s, often referred to as the 90s Trend, comprised a variety of anti-institutional responses to the prolonged civil war, discrimination and other sociopolitical factors in the country. Considered contemporary Sri Lanka’s primary avant-garde movement, the 90s Trend pioneered performance and installation art in the country, with artists such as Jagath Weerasinghe and Anoli Perera, and also saw a network of new galleries and artist-led initiatives emerge, such as the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts and the Theertha International Artists’ Collective. It extended well into the 2000s and its attendant ideology continued to inspire younger artists.

The 1980s was a politically turbulent period for Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan Civil War (1983–2009) began during this time, fought primarily between the national government and the separatist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), with other belligerents joining in at different stages of the conflict. Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a Marxist political party and militant organisation, also led an insurrection between 1987 and 1989, following an earlier one in 1971. The country was witnessing a rising disillusionment with nationalist propaganda and the negative consequences of economic liberalisation in the 1970s. Several artists of this period criticised the state’s weaponisation of nationalist and Sinhalese ethnic identity against the Tamil minority and socialist groups; the suppression of press freedom; and the pervasive linguistic bias towards Sinhala over Tamil in administrative and educational institutions. Multiple generations of artists also faced the lack of institutional recognition or support for any political discourse in art.

These factors led to the emergence of a new movement, spearheaded by many of Sri Lanka’s best-known contemporary artists and curators, including Perera, Weerasinghe, Chandraguptha Thenuwara and Sharmini Pereira; Weerasinghe dubbed it the 90s Trend. Many of these artists had attended the country’s colonial-era Institute of Aesthetic Studies (IAS, known today as the University of the Visual and Performing Arts) in Colombo, and had been active in student protests at the institute. The Sri Lankan institutional landscape was shaped by a Modernist sensibility introduced by the ’43 Group about fifty years earlier. Rooted in the country’s pre-modern heritage, it had served to shape the cultural identity of a newly independent nation, but was now largely appropriated by upper class, urban art practitioners. The artists of the 90s Trend were disillusioned with its lack of political consciousness and questioned its relevance in an era of extremist nationalism and discrimination within the country. 

Most of these new artists came from working class, often rural backgrounds, and had faced or witnessed political violence. Later teaching at the IAS, artists like Perera, Weerasinghe and Thenuwara brought to their students and contemporaries a wider, more informed worldview along with an understanding of critical theory and art historical processes. Steering away from Sri Lankan Modernism’s institutionalised tropes, these artists were able to root their work in more immediate social and political realities. The 90s Trend was shaped by ideas from a diverse range of identities, including women and underprivileged groups, allowing artists to create a new visual vocabulary instead of relying on frameworks from which they had historically been excluded. Many 90s Trend artists began experimenting with conceptual, installation and performance art so as to better embody and comment on pressing sociopolitical issues.

The period saw an increase in commercial art spaces which provided a platform for alternative, anti-establishment perspectives and practices, such as the Heritage Gallery founded by Ajitha de Costa and Gallery 706 (now Barefoot Art Gallery) founded by Dominic and Nazreen Sansoni. Such spaces helped create an active, stable network of art practitioners in Sri Lanka by the 2000s.

Weerasinghe’s show Anxiety (1992) at the National Art Gallery, Colombo (NAG) is considered the first major exhibition of the 90s Trend. His drawings and paintings — showing severed human heads and broken stupas suggesting the deterioration of Buddhist ideals in the country — were accompanied by a musical composition by the singer-composer Senaka Batagoda. The show also featured Sri Lanka’s first work of performance art, a commentary on hidden state-sanctioned violence choreographed by Weerasinghe and featuring Anna Puff, Nimal Mendis, Sarath Kumarasari and Wijitha Bandara. 

A number of group exhibitions during this period demonstrated the collectivist, multifaceted nature of the movement. Weerasinghe, Thenuwara, Kingsley Gunatillake, Tissa de Alwis and other key artists of the movement participated in New Approaches in Contemporary Sri Lankan Art (1994) curated by Pereira, also held at the NAG. The specially modified gallery space displayed de Alwis’s characteristic army figurines; paintings by Thenuwara on the death of journalist Richard Manik de Zoysa at the hands of government agents; and one of the first instances of installation art in Sri Lanka — Weerasinghe’s Shrine II (Of Innocent Saints), comprising three paintings hung above an arrangement of sculpted heads, pillows and candles. 

Perera’s installation The Vehicle Named Woman (1998), shown at Heritage Gallery, consisted of a female form painted across the parts of a dismantled car, as a comment on the appropriation of womanhood and women’s sexuality for various narratives. Thenuwara’s Barrelism series, beginning with the eponymous 1997 show at Heritage Gallery, highlighted the militarisation of urban spaces through installations of painted metal barrels, often used for barricading in Sri Lanka. This use of urban imagery and themes was novel as the city was largely absent from the aesthetic frameworks of the 43 Group and preceding colonial institutions, which focused more on idyllic rural landscapes and Sri Lankan monuments.

Other significant group exhibitions of the 90s Trend include Made in IAS (2000) at Gallery 706, which featured works by artists who had taught at the IAS; and Reclaiming Histories: Retrospective Exhibition of Women’s Art (2000), curated by Perera, at Sapumal Foundation in Colombo and noted for creating a space for women artists in the country. 

Important collaborative relationships and para-institutional ventures emerged during this period, providing an evolving support system for political discourse through art, and filling the void created by the country’s traditional art institutions. In response to the academic and linguistic barriers at the IAS, Thenuwara founded the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts in 1993 as a more inclusive, politically conscious and pedagogically progressive alternative. Its focus is on providing students the skills and experience towards developing an artistic practice, including active support for student and alumni exhibitions, rather than on academic certifications — which are neither required for joining nor awarded on completion of the course. Some of its graduates, along with Thenuwara, later formed the No Order Group in 1999 — which according to their manifesto, was a postmodernist counter to the ’43 Group. The No Order Group did not have a rigid structure or paid membership, and was founded along the same lines as other organisations generated by the 90s Trend.

In 2000, during a period when a number of artist collectives were emerging in South Asia, Weerasinghe, Perera, Pradeep Chandrasiri and Pala Pothupitiya, along with other contemporaries, started Theertha International Artists’ Collective. Within the larger aim of generating new artistic discourse and solidarity across the Global South that many of these organisations shared, Theertha aimed to provide platforms for politically conscious, experimental art in Sri Lanka, particularly for young, emerging artists. It has also established a number of international collaborations. 

With 90s Trend artists like Perera and Weerasinghe taking on the role of the movement’s chroniclers in the 2000s, it has come to be seen by scholars of South Asian contemporary art as a critical period in Sri Lanka’s art history. It fostered a civic sense, internationalist outlook and critical thinking among artists, as well as spaces and decentralised support networks for unconventional art and political discourse, which have shaped subsequent generations of artists in the country.